Re: Who still uses floppies these days?

thewises wrote:
>> I believe I have 6-8 5.25 inch floppies. I do not believe there is a way to

open the disks on a modern PC or Mac. Or is there?

If you have a PC, you can always attach a 5.25" floppy drive. The
cables and connectors are still there. ;-)


Not really. XP will still recognize 5.25" drives, but most recent PCs have a floppy ribbon cable that only has a connector for one drive. You'd have to get a floppy cable with 5.25" connectors. Anyway, a 5.25" drive looks pretty silly inside a modern PC case.

Silly is in the eye of the beholder. ;-)

I have noticed that the dual-floppy cables are becoming a thing of the
past. But there are still plenty around at thrift shops, etc. I'd
expect that wherever you got a 5.25" floppy drive, you also could get
the cable.

I know OSX cant read ProDOS, and I doubt XP can.

XP can read ProDOS disks fine if you have CiderPress--an amazingly
versatile shareware program (Google it for details).


Again, not really. CiderPress can only read 720k or 1.44MB(ie. MFM) ProDOS disks. PC floppy controllers are physically incapable of reading GCR disks.

Of course that's *mostly* true. I use 1.44MB ProDOS disks and 32MB
ProDOS partitions on a CF card.

But, if you have two floppy drives (one can be a 3.5" floppy), you can
read Apple GCR disks using the program DSK2FDI--a remarkable hack done
a year or so ago. This can be used to create a disk image file, and
then CiderPress can be used to access/manipulate the files.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."
.

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