HxC Gotek Floppy Emulator in the Akai S900 & Akai ASQ10

A quick video discussing the merits and drawbacks of the Gotek HxC enabled floppy drive emulators in the Akai S900 and ASQ10.

A link to the eBay listing (active as of 14/04/2017

If you have any questions regarding the installation or function of these drives then please feel free to leave a comment.

===EDIT===

Someone has already compiled an S900 Zip which can be found at the link below.

[DJDEEM]

Thanks for the information. I recently replaced a cap on my S900 that had been sitting in storage for about 20 years. It works great now and I decided to replace the display and upgrade to a Gotek Floppy Emulator. Thanks for making the S900 Zip images available. Although I use the NI Maschine Studio and an iMac for music production now, I can't part with my SP1200 or my S900 that where the work horses in my studio for decades. Thanks again bro.

[badpixelboy]

Casio retro watch... check. Akai S900 samplers... check. A ton of floppies I can't use any more... check.
Now It's time for that hxc floppy emulation stuff.
Thanks for the video.

[traccid]

got the emulator today, opened up my asq 10, build in the gotec, switched it on... and !!!! yes.... first i had to do format disk, and then…. save all sequenses save song, rename song.. it all works. i, m so happy. fantastic. thanks to this video . massive.

[muzixco]

Good job on updating your classic gear mate, should give you many more years of enjoyment!

[DanielHutchinson]

Thanks for the the info — the drive in my S950 has just done the same so I've ordered one via your link.

[vinyljunkie]

Very nice great success! You can always load your S900 floppies on that S2800 I gave you if you ever find a cheap floppy drive for it.

[Blahrgifkrtrgf]

Nice gear collection you got there. Are you running OS4 on the S900?

[RickyTinez]

hmmm, been trying to install this on an MPC60II for awhile now and i thought i had it right but it acts funny with a USB inserted. If inserted and i press either button a quick 'd0' pops up for a split second.

Maybe i used the wrong drives on the USB? Which disk images did you use for the 900?

[sfx]

If you have a USB floppy drive you could theoretically dump the disk with Linux using the dd command. As for the floppies that don't work the drive that wrote them could have misaligned heads, which means you might need to use the drive that wrote them to read them. You might be able to put that drive in an old PC. The other option would be to misalign the heads of another drive until you can read it, which would be a pain. Also, I believe the USB floppies don't always support 720K disks, and 2.88M disks might be an issue if your equipment supports them.

[BITJuNGLEOuTTHeRe]

Hey how are you? I’m curious to know what issues you had when you had to ribbon cable in the wrong way. I’ve just fitted a hotel drive in my s950. It has the flash floppy format which is apparently a clone of Hxc and supports all the same formats including HFE. I loaded it with the 1k HFE s900 images from the link you share in your description and with the ribbon cable in matching the notch it sees the images as unformatted but says write protected when I try to format. I thought I’d try flipping the ribbon cable and with it in the opposite way it goes through the format process but shows 0% space on the disc image and when you leave the format page it displays as unformatted again. I notice on the USB itself when I look at it on my Mac that the format process creates a new cfg image? I don’t know what significance that has? Any info on the probs you had would help. Thanks

[LlewynDaviesTheThird]

Really helpful. Cheers for this. Guys out stock at the moment :(

[bitley]

Excellent info, thanks a lot, thinking about doing this on the S-1000 KB

[HarryAxten]

Thanks for this - I've just repaired an old Akai S2800 and was thinking about getting one of these floppy emulators for it.

[diggerjams]

Great!, Can you please explain exactly the steps you took at 3:05 min. Load up the disc image and configuration files. Is this on a computer and you load the files to usb using appropriate software?

[mrfpd]

Hello I made a purchase from the link in description but, it doesn't say that this gotek model is compitbale with hxc, how I am gonna make it work?

[sanjacob]

hi nolan, do you know if that disk image will work on a s950 too ? thanks for the great videos and the classic house sound, love it.

[toitoitoy]

Please, tell us about your setup and instruments. What's that digital delay sampler thing in the left rack?

[lardosian]

Nice studio, do you not run out of channels on that Mackie??

[EvLoutonian]

Awesome!
Good to see.
I used to use ASQ-10, and hoping to get another one (or MPC-60), and S900.
Do you still have the info & files involved with the process, as you mentioned in the vid?

Thanks!

[BITJuNGLEOuTTHeRe]

Really keen to try this. Did you ever get round to putting a zip together with the files to set it up? Also do you know if any hxc drive will work. I'm assuming when they advertise for amiga/Yamaha etc that's just what it's been formatted to? Thanks