Re: New IIgs owner.

[CUTjblakeney@sympatico.ca (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 17 Dec 2001 19:02:52 GMT, mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote:

>Jeff Blakeney wrote:
>
>>The Commodore 1541 drive is an "intelligent" drive in that it has a
>>processor, ROM and RAM in it.  Because of this, I'm pretty sure I
>>remember hearing that you could send code to the drive to allow you to
>>read/write Apple II format disks.
>
>It was the ROM part that I expected precluded radical disk format
>changes.  I'd be very interested in the methodology to read/write(?)
>Apple disks.

As I said, I'm only pretty sure you could send code to the 1541 to
make it do things it wasn't initially designed to do.  I remember
seeing someone set up a C-64 with two 1541 drives and used a program
to start a disk copy and then disconnected the C-64 from the drives
and the drives continued copying.  The computer wasn't involved in the
copy process at all.

Also, because the 1541 is an intelligent drive, you can always replace
the ROM if you had to.  That's how JiffyDOS worked.  You replaced a
ROM in both the C-64 and the 1541 to get way faster disk access.

If I come across any info in this regard I'll let you know.

--
 Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II Unversity on A2Central.com
               - CUT the obvious from my address to e-mail me