Re: Making Apple II or C64 floppies with PC 5.25" drive?
- From: Tony Diaz <A2Aviator-theS@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:37:49 -0800
Some indirect commentary on disk drives in general....
Going back in the years.. despite all the bickering back and forth
between Apple II and Commodore users... we knew one thing, while the
1541 (there was no 1571) was slower than snail mail and a woodpecker
doing punch cards, it seemed.. they were an awsome piece of machinery.
You could load a program that for whatever reason I can't recall it's
name right now, yank the cable from two 1541s and let them stand alone
on the table and one would read, the other would write. When you put a
disk in and pinched shut, it would start reading. Then the other drive
would write in Disk Muncher style. After a couple minutes you had a
copy.
These setups would sit at 'wares' gatherings and a Flip 'n File box on
top with *write protected* disks in it, take out what you want, put it
in the top drive, put your blank in the bottom, and when the LEDs quit,
your copy was done.
Your standard PC hardware is capabile of doing GCR, with some help from
the outside, such as the Trackstar card and other similar solutions.
There was also a DigiCard interface for an Apple II 20 pin drive on x86
hardware back in the day.
At one time I put together an interface that would attach to the back
of a Teac 55FB series or similar 360K drive, you would detach the cable
assembly from the Teac's analog card that went to the stepper motor and
attach it directly to the interface. The interface card had a 34 pin
slot edge on it to attach to the back of the Teac where the PC drive
cable goes. This card worked the stepper motor directly via the Apple
Disk ][ Card or Smart Port interface since that was one of the things
Apple (Woz) did differently. The rest of the hardware would work just
fine with the GCR signals.
Using this card you could use those Teac half height drives in a
typical HH 5.25" enclosure. A second - cool hack was that I would take
the Disk ][ Card and redirect one signal to set the drive up to use the
backside of the disk as the second drive. Though this was not really
usefull overall because these disks could only be read back on this
drive, it was interesting none the less, with the use of a RANA 4 drive
card you could double the amount of storage to 8 sides, you could also
do the same with a Disk ][ card and an additional gate on the card,
with the same DOS patches that Rana and the Sider would use, by
accessing the disks as Volume 1, 2, 3 and 4, or patched for ,D1, D2,
D3, D4.. you could access the additional sides.
The days of this being useful would have been more and more prior to it
being done, IE, back in the early BBS days, AE and Cat-Fur lines... by
the time half height drives existed, hard drives didn't cost what they
did. A few years later, you could get that 10 meg Sider for $695.00
But.. it was fun to mess with.
Another DOS trick was also to make a double volume, and stripe the
floppy sides. So that odd tracks were on side 0 and even tracks were
side 1, and count to 70 tracks. This produced definately odd disks that
if someone ever needed security by obscurity - this was it.
For those that never knew though, DOS 3.3 could handle up to 400K
without *any mods* what so ever.
The 143K limit was the hardware. 35 tracks, 16 sectors. The 400K drive
that was in the original Macintosh was, (as is every single 20 pin
drive) electrically compatible with the Disk ][, 99%. There are some
slight differences, but attaching a 400K drive to the Disk ][ card
would not do anything bad electrically. Working it is another issue.
But DOS 3.3 can do a 400K volume unmodified. Hence the Sider "super
volume".
In the days we sure did some interesting things with Corvus OminDrives
and the previous Corvus drives.
...and the Apple IIgs with 16 Disk ][s and 8 SASI drives, we did that
once in 1988 or so just to see how much stuff could be attached to an
Apple II using every concievable card plus the built in port.
Never tell an Apple II user it can't be done, thats usually the
quickest way to have it appear.... at least, it used to work. ;-)
Tony
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