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Re: Apple Assenbly Cookbook now available as free ebook



On 03/23/2011 06:19 PM, Michael J. Mahon wrote:

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.

I worry that the DiskFerret will suffer the same lack of Apple
disk support that dogs the CatWeasel. ;-)

As a CW owner, I feel burned by the lack of support.  No argument.

However, Philip already has the DF decoding Commodore GCR diskettes so it's a mechanical step to handling A2 formats.

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).

Protected disks are a tough nut to crack, I'll concede that point.