Although emulators are available, finding the right one and getting it to work is/was a nightmare so here's the rundown for anyone with a Trinity wanting to do the same.
There may be (and almost certainly are) alternatives to the information below but this is the route I took.
The emulator I installed in the Trinity is a Gotek SFR1 M44-U100K. I've seen these re-branded, and the spacing in the model number varies from place to place but they should all work.
This emulator does not support the Disk Ready signal that a lot of floppy drives used to indicate disk changes. There is another model in the range that does, which is the SFR1 M44-U100K-R (note the "R" at the end) but the Trinity does not work with that emulator if the Drive Ready signal is enabled. It does work if the Disk Ready signal is disabled however, so it's a perfectly valid alternative emulator to use.
When using either of these emulators, it is best to download and install the Ketron Virtual Floppy Explorer utilities. These can be found here at the time of writing (scroll down and look for the download labelled "Scarica il software di gestione per Windows7". The software itself is in English) and consists of a utility to format a USB stick to work with the emulator as well as a utility to transfer files to and from the virtual floppies on the stick.
Update (17th November 2022): the link to the software above no longer works, try this: https://www.ketron.it/en/software-2/usb-floppy-software.
The version you want is the Windows 7 software (the XP version is a formatter only) and the downloaded file is called FdUsbW7_ketron.exe. It works fine on Windows 10.
The SFR1 M44-U100K supports up to 1000 virtual floppies (numbered 0-999) on a single USB stick, and the SFR1 M44-U100K-R supports up to 100 (numbered 0-99). My advice is to stick to 100 regardless of the emulator model. Also, use a small USB stick - I found 4Gb ones to work well.
Once partitioned and formatted by the Ketron utility, the USB stick should only be written to by the Ketron Virtual Floppy File Explorer and the Korg Trinity itself. Do not use Windows file explorer to drag files onto the stick as this may corrupt it to the point that it cannot even be reformatted.
Regardless of which of the above emulators you are using, you will need to change the jumpers on it before installation such that Drive 1 is selected (the default is Drive 0). To do this, set the jumpers as shown in the picture below:
The above jumper settings will disable the Drive Ready signals from the SFR1 M44-U100K-R, but as I said before, the Korg Trinity doesn't work with them anyway and if they are enabled then it won't see the disks on the USB stick.
Once everything is back together again, you can select a virtual floppy number using the two buttons on the front of the emulator (the left does single digits, the right does 10s). There is no decrement button however... to select a lower numbered floppy you have to roll back to disk 00 by incrementing the values and start over.
Once DISK mode has been selected on the Trinity, all being well you should see the contents of whichever virtual floppy you have selected. However at that point you're stuck with that floppy for the duration of the session; the Trinity will not recognise disk changes unless you have the HDR-TRI option installed on the Trinity. If you do, then you can change disk number without rebooting by going into the "Audio Utilities" tab in DISK mode and selecting "Select Mount Mode" from the drop-down menu in the top right of the screen:
- trinityMenu.png (21.81 KiB) Viewed 4674 times
It can all be a bit fiddly and daunting to set up, and most Trinity users don't have the HDR option so will have to live without the ability to change disks but hopefully the information above will save someone some headscratching and having a working emulator in the Korg really does breathe new life into it.
With the USB emulator up and running you can save/load as normal from the Trinity, and you can drag files off the USB stick in Windows (Windows Explorer will only see the first floppy) as well as access all the individual floppies via the Ketron software so at least you can back your data up easily.
If anyone knows of an emulator that the Trinity can use that natively supports recognising disk changes, then I'd love to know about it, although in my case the workaround using the HDR-TRI option does the trick as well.
Wouldn’t have it any other way.
