Re: Apple ][ using PC floppy

[alex.freed.007@gmail.com]

On Dec 30, 3:22 pm, nyder <nyder...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm a little lost as the useful purpose of this.   while i understand
> 5.25 dd floppies are hard to get, soon the 3.5 floppies are going to
> be hard to get.   Computers don't come with floppy drives anymore.
>
> wouldn't it be more practical to make a board that converts possible
> disk images to "virtual floppies" that the computer will just see as a
> floppy?  besides maybe a device driver to control which image your
> loading, you wouldn't have to hack the OS to get a fix that would
> break other floppy drives.

Funny that you mention it: a device pretty close to what you describe
does exist.
My PseudoDisk ][.
See http://mirrow.com/FPGApple/pseudodisk.html

It uses .NIB images on a FAT formatted MMC/SD card as virtual
floppies. No patches needed.
It can also work with "hard disk" ProDOS images up to 32MB each, read
and write real fast.
Unfortunately there was very limited public interest in this (open
source) project and only one person
participated in the firmware development. Coincidentally the author of
this project - vladitx.
The main problem is that one need to reset the PseudoDisk to get to
the firmware that allows
to select an image to use. It's easy enough to write a simple program
on the Apple side to do it,
but it won't help to change the "disk" in the middle of a game.

-Alex.