Re: Does anyone need IDEfile PCBs?

Michael J. Mahon schrieb:

Which raises the question of why anyone would *want* to insert a
ProFile interface between an Apple II and an IDE drive when there
are already several direct IDE interfaces available.

Only to prove that it works. For the II series, a CFFA or Focus card is the better option. IIRC the Profile was only supported by UCSD Pascal, while most people in EU ran DOS 3.3 and most in US had ProDOS.

The IDEfile protocol converter has been designed for the Apple III and Lisa. There were no alternatives to the Profile and Widget drives (except for the Sun-20, which today are collectors items as well). About one year after I published the circuit, a company came up with the X/Profile. A commercial solution, not cheap, but surely an alternative for those people who prefer buy over build.


What was the "design maximum" size of a ProFile? (I'm only aware
of 5MB and 10MB implementations.) Is the interface (and driver)
capable of 32MB? Multiple partitions?

The protocol supports $FFFFF0 blocks which equals 8GB. However, all existing implementations use only the lower two address bytes, clipping the range to 32MB.

IDEfile supports a 32MB volume, but MacWorks Plus (a MacOS emulator for the Lisa) is the only software than can take advantage of this size. All other operating systems support 5 and 10 MB only. Everything that is not 10 MB is treated as a 5 MB volume.


The only use I can see is for someone who has a failing ProFile
and wants to make a hardware substitution, leaving all else
unchanged.

Exactly. And as an Apple II user, you would put the complete drive onto the shelf and watch its ebay value increasing. During the last years this stuff had a better performance than some company shares =:-(


Best regards
Patrick





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