Steven Hirsch wrote:
On 03/23/2011 09:53 AM, Mike wrote:On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:23:55 -0700 (PDT), Sean Fahey <a2fan@hotmail.com> wrote:On Mar 23, 2:08 am, "Michael J. Mahon"<mjma...@aol.com> wrote:I'm not exactly sure what capabilities you are wishing for, but there is a device to connect a standard TEAC 5.25" drive to a PC's USB port for imaging standard formatted Apple 5.25" disks--the FC5025. It is more difficult to capture the "back" side of a "flippy" disk, but with appropriate modifications to the drive or the disk, that can also be done.I'm hoping Willegal has a breakthrough with his project. http://www.willegal.net/appleii/appleii-disk-int.htmThe Kryoflux device is showing promise, too. Doesn't say anything about whether it can read the back side of a flippy. They are also promising write support in the upcoming drivers.Don't forget DiscFerret: http://www.discferret.com/Software support is coming slowly, but the entire project is open-source. AFAIK, there are parts of Kryoflux that are proprietary.Philip Pemberton (DF designer) is nothing short of a wizard. Discferret hardware is fast enough to handle MFM drives in theory.Disclaimer: I have no stake in Discferret other than being in awe of its creator and owning one myself.
This sounds a bit like overkill for Apple disks, but it should certainly permit reading of the front side of any Apple disk, with interpretation left to software as yet unwritten. It reminds me a bit of the capabilities of DISK2FDI, which needs no additional hardware to read Apple disks, but the software only decodes standard-format Apple disks. It would be interesting to compare DiskFerret with the FC 5025. I suspect that both are equally capable of reading Apple disks, though, again, FC 5025 software only supports decoding standard- format disks. I worry that the DiskFerret will suffer the same lack of Apple disk support that dogs the CatWeasel. ;-) It isn't hard to capture magnetic transitions on a track. It's a little harder to decode them if they come from a standard-format disk. It's an as-yet unsolved problem to decode the transition map (with fractional tracks) into a usable image of a general protected Apple disk (though the simpler .nib decoding shouldn't be too hard). -michael NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."