Re: Apple 3.5" drive questions

["Lee Cremeans" <lee@lcremeans.homeip.net>]

"Tony Cianfaglione" <ab616@chebucto.ns.ca> wrote in message
Pine.GSO.3.95.iB1.0.1030304181525.7312C-100000@halifax.chebucto.ns.ca">news:Pine.GSO.3.95.iB1.0.1030304181525.7312C-100000@halifax.chebucto.ns.ca..
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>
> Let's look at it from the other way around...could an MS-DOS drive
> (either 3.5" or 5.25") in a PC read and write to GS or 8 bit disks in a
> format that a IIe/IIc/GS would recognize?

No, not with a standard PC controller anyway. That controller is based on an
old Intel/NEC floppy disk controller (the i8272/uPD765) that only supported
FM and MFM in hardware. It can't do anything else.

However, there have been boards made that can force a PC floppy drive to
read Apple disks, Commodore disks, etc. One was the old Copy II PC Option
Board (which also had the nice-at-the-time feature of being able to handle
"uncopyable" disks -- it came out in the late 1980s, and apparently didn't
sell too well, so good luck finding one); another is the CatWeasel series of
boards (http://www.jschoenfeld.com/indexe.htm), which I haven't tried myself
but purport to read every disk format you can throw at them. CatWeasel's
somewhat Amiga-centric (the PC software is very limited in functionality),
but so far I haven't seen anything else like it that's actually in
production.

-lee