On Mon, 6 May 2013, David Schmidt wrote:
Some of the issue now is that they've disappeared. It wasn't that long ago that I was still regularly seeing computers on the sidewalk with the 5.25" drives. But it's been a while since that happened. They were so common, I never bothered to collect a lot. So the only 5.25" drives I have are the relative few that I did pull out of discarded computers, that and the two drives I bought new in 1984 and a few years later at fairly high prices. I seem to have more 3.5" drives than 5.25" lying around.On 5/6/2013 2:17 AM, Peter Dassow wrote: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 ...Indeed, old drives are still plentiful and cheap, for the most part. Though not everywhere in the world, of course. The function necessary would be to duplicate the analog board that currently lives inside the Disk II drive.
I'm sure thay are still out there, but not as easy as at one time. Michael
Several FGPA/whatever boards have been produced over the years to interface to drives in various ways, not all having to do with the Apple II:Kryoflux FC-5025 HDDDExperiments exist going the other direction, such as Mike Willegal's USB-to-Disk II drive:http://www.willegal.net/appleii/appleii-disk-int.htmBut the need/incentive to go from Disk II interface to some other kind of floppy drive simply hasn't arisen.