Re: A wishful thought?

[david@uow.edu.au (David Wilson)]

Frank Carney <frankc@cyberhighway.net> writes:
>This is right on target, I am still (although slowly) learning how to
>build  a card to support bootable devices on the Apple II.  However, I

This is easy (for ProDOS/Pascal 1.3). Just follow the ProDOS block device
specs or the Smartport specs. I have written two or three of these.

>am also interested in interfacing Apple II drives to the PC.  I do like
>some work I have seen with the Commodore 1541, but I would like to work
>on a 3.5 inch drive interface.  It can't be that hard to build a smart
>controller that interfaces through the parallel port to talk the drives.

A small card with a 65c02, IWM or SWIM, ROM, RAM and a PIA/VIA type chip would
do it. 25 pins to the PC parallel port, 19 to the Apple disk drives. Probably
a plug pack power supply would not be enough as you really need +/-12 and +5
volt supplies to work with all Apple 5.25" drives.
--
David Wilson  School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia