Re: Is an apple 3.5 disk to USB converter available? Where?
- From: dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Empson)
- Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 18:01:07 +1200
Don Lancaster <don@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is an apple 3.5 disk to USB converter available? Where?
Never heard of one. Mainstream USB floppy drives support 720K and 1.44MB
MFM-encoded disks. They won't work with 400K or 800K (GCR) floppies.
In principle, someone could build a disk controller using an embedded
micro which has USB support. This would be similar in complexity to
Apple's SuperDrive card, with the added requirement of software support
for the USB protocol and drivers in the host computer (for whichever
operating systems were to be supported).
Seems like an awful lot of work, plus it requires custom hardware (IWM
or SWIM chip) that Apple made, or a clone using FPGA.
There is also the question of file system support in the host operating
system - ProDOS, Pascal, CP/M, MFS or HFS according to what is on the
floppy.
If not, what is the simplest way to transfer files on thousands of IIe
disks?
A IIgs with a 3.5" drive and CFFA or hard drive which can be reconnected
to another computer that is able to access the files in whichever file
system you used (ProDOS or HFS). You could probably do it with a IIe, as
long as you had the right peripherals for it.
I'd be inclined to do this sort of thing using my IIgs with a spare SCSI
hard drive and then transferring it to a Mac OS 9 era PowerMac.
There is also the question of how to convert the documents into a format
which is usable in a more recent computer. This is a can of worms by
itself.
--
David Empson
dempson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.
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