Lets get something straight before we begin, I love floppy disks! Great little media storage solution and like many other retro computer collectors I have hundreds. I am not even kidding, I’ve got Acorn floppies, Atari ST floppies, Amiga floppies and Dos floppies. However not matter how nostalgic i feel about them we have to acknowledge their flaws, thy are all getting old and weather its the disks themselves or the drives that read them but errors are becoming more frequent.
Here we have My Olivetti M240 640k computer,
this shipped with a 360k floppy drive which I changed as i don’t have many dos formatted single density kicking around and no other computers to write them on. So the 1.44mb drive went in and it is entirely period correct for the computer. However read write errors continued to plague my experience and no it’s not the drive, I tried different drives and spent hour formatting and writing disks for a good 1/4 of them to fail once in use. So whats a retro geek to do?
Gotek makes a floppy drive emulator and I think most of china makes knockoff ones now, not that I’m complaining this one only cost me £13 bargain! It directly emulates any floppy drive you can think of and with different firmware even does odd drive like the Amiga. The computer just sees it as a 1.44mb floppy drive.
Images of floppies you’ve made or found??
can be written to virtual floppies contained on a USB pen, up to 999 images can be made if your USB device can hold that much. It is easy and if you’re struggling and reading this then just watch Phil’s Computer Labs video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taFP1J_lZBI&t=304s
Once the disks are on there, plug-in the USB device and away you go however is it right to do so? Lets skip over the Ethics of downloading dos games from the net and all that gubbins as that’s not a topic i want to get into and besides if it’s truly abandon ware then its fair game. I want to look at it from this angle.
Dose This look normal to you?
It bugs me a little that this changes the look of your vintage PC which is part of the whole joy of retro collecting for some. The aesthetics of the machine, especially a good-looking Olivetti M240 are part of the joy and HELL its a big grey box on your desk its hard to ignore so its got to look good. Period correctness also goes out the window, not a huge deal for most of us but for some its everything. I certainly wouldn’t sell a system with a Gotek in place and I wouldn’t want to buy one with a Gotek either as I would feel like something about the computer was missing. 
I am not against modding computers or consoles.
Far from it, I love modding and pushing hardware as far as it will go and truthfully i fit a Gotek where i can. Sure I feel a little dirty afterwards and yes it feels like a little of the fun is gone when you not having to switch disks every 30 seconds but when you realize you have been playing dos games and loading programs with out a single “read failed, retry, abort ,fail” message its well worth it.
FDISKformat 