Re: New IIgs owner.

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

CUTjblakeney@sympatico.ca (Jeff Blakeney) wrote:

>mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote:
>
>>Jeff Blakeney wrote:
>>
>>>The Commodore 1541 drive is an "intelligent" drive in that it has a
>>>processor, ROM and RAM in it.  Because of this, I'm pretty sure I
>>>remember hearing that you could send code to the drive to allow you to
>>>read/write Apple II format disks.
>>
>>It was the ROM part that I expected precluded radical disk format
>>changes.  I'd be very interested in the methodology to read/write(?)
>>Apple disks.
>
>As I said, I'm only pretty sure you could send code to the 1541 to
>make it do things it wasn't initially designed to do.  I remember
>seeing someone set up a C-64 with two 1541 drives and used a program
>to start a disk copy and then disconnected the C-64 from the drives
>and the drives continued copying.  The computer wasn't involved in the
>copy process at all.
>
>Also, because the 1541 is an intelligent drive, you can always replace
>the ROM if you had to.  That's how JiffyDOS worked.  You replaced a
>ROM in both the C-64 and the 1541 to get way faster disk access.
>
>If I come across any info in this regard I'll let you know.

I am sure there is a way to get it to run Apple II disks.  The reason
is that many years ago I read a review of something called the
Spartan emulator for the Commodore 64.  This was a box that
was simply a clone of the Apple II Plus complete with seven slots.
You plugged the entire box into the Commodore 64 and the 64
now had Apple II Plus mode.  Part of the mod was that the 1541
drives read and write Apple II Plus disks.

What I don't remember is if this was all done in software or
whether you had to crack open the 1541 to plug in a new ROM
chip.  I'm sure a little research will reveal the answer.  The kind
of research that involves trips to libraries that is.  ;-)  This kind
of stuff was before the world wide web.

By the way, I am certain of one thing and that is that one of the
advantages of the emulator I mentioned was that you did not
have to go out and buy a Disk II and controller.