redruM69
Experienced Member
For the past couple of months I have been fighting my Osborne trying to get it to boot from real floppies.
Lots of troubleshooting and spare parts later, I found that all 4 of my floppy drives are bad! Yesterday I successfully adapted the non-standard shugart interface to a Gotek Floppy emulator w/ HxC firmware installed. It boots up great now! I figured I'd share the cable adaption for others that want to attempt this. The Osborne floppy cable carries 12v and 5v power supply lines which need to be cut. Drive select pins are also a bit different, and there are some other un-needed pins. With some modifications to a standard floppy cable, it will work. I haven't tried it yet, but you should be able to use the Gotek drive on the end of a double cable, with an original drive on the other connector. This diagram has the drive select set as "A", but you can swap around those pins and make it drive "B".
Lots of troubleshooting and spare parts later, I found that all 4 of my floppy drives are bad! Yesterday I successfully adapted the non-standard shugart interface to a Gotek Floppy emulator w/ HxC firmware installed. It boots up great now! I figured I'd share the cable adaption for others that want to attempt this. The Osborne floppy cable carries 12v and 5v power supply lines which need to be cut. Drive select pins are also a bit different, and there are some other un-needed pins. With some modifications to a standard floppy cable, it will work. I haven't tried it yet, but you should be able to use the Gotek drive on the end of a double cable, with an original drive on the other connector. This diagram has the drive select set as "A", but you can swap around those pins and make it drive "B".