Re: Apple II 3.5" floppy disk question

[cutterjohn <someone@nowhere.com>]

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 08:32:28 -0500, Dan Foster wrote:

> Does 1.4 MB Mac SuperDrive support GCR-encoded floppies (Apple IIGS 800K)?

yes it does.  I used to use my old IIcx w/superdrive and then a
pm7500 w/superdrive to read/write 800k disks
for transfer to/from the GS.  (As noted by the other poster, you'd need a
separate drive controller card to use superdrives with the GS, but I don't
think that you were really asking about that...)

Watch out for file mangling by MacOS.  I just went through dealing with
this a few weeks ago, and will try to dig up the programs used to ensure
that MacOS didn't go around randomly corrupting(adding resource forks) to
my GS STuff.  The info is also out on the web, don't recall the site
offhand, and I had to do some digging to find the utils.  (As an excample
of what will happen is that ShrinkIt archives when opened with ShrinkIt on
the GS will complain about not being valid ShrinkIt archives etc.  Truth
is that they are perfectly valid but MacOS added a resource fork somewhere
in the transfer while on the Mac.  I think that there might be a gs
program to remove the resource forks too, but I had good luck with the mac
program... I'll try to find it's name when the 7500 is hooked up again...)

(In a pinch I also have a 1M Atari 520 ST with Spectre 128 & Transfer One
which will let me read/write 800k GCR disks on the Atari as well as run a
fair bit of oldish(up to system 6 compat, theoretically system 7 too, but
I never tried it w/Spectre) mac stuff...)

BTW: I don't know how much SE/30s are going for, but I can imagine that
older powerpc Powermacs, e.g. 7500/8500/9500 can't be that much in price
difference, and might actually be a better buy wrt to giving you a
somewhat upgradeable/usable mac rather than just a disk transfer station...


...now I have to see if I can get that 1040STe for a decent price and then
consider $50 for 4M for the GS... (wish that the IDE interfaces were
$50... or SCSI...)