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Re: Anybody aware of the description of a 19pin connector of an Apple 5.25 Disk Drive ?



On 06.05.2013 03:11, Michael J. Mahon wrote:


I thought you were confused about the level difference between PC floppy
drives and Apple floppy drives--and you are.

No "cable" can convert the Apple floppy interface to a standard floppy
interface.

In 1982, I converted two standard SA400's to be Disk ][ compatible. It
involved about six pages (single-spaced) of wiring changes to the
digital/analog board in the drive. I recall spending about three hours
modifying each board--lots of wire and solder!

The net effect of the extensive modifications was to disable virtually all
of the digital controller on the board, directly exposing the head stepper
motor phases and directly connecting to the write signal and the detected
head read signal.

Since the SA400 boards were built entirely of MSI TTL chips, all nodes of
the circuit were available for modification. Modern (!) floppy drives have
many fewer chips with higher integration levels, so it is unlikely that
such a modification would still be possible.

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon


Ok, I got it, regardless of the fact that I really owned non-Apple Floppy Disk Drives around 1985. May be these non-Apple Drives were still compatible to these original ones, I can't check this now. But this is almost unbelievable that nobody yet created a logic board with an FPGA/whatever which converts the signals/creates the missing signals. May be too much old drives are still available ...