Re: How to read old Apple floppies on Mac?

["ralmin" <xbiber@bigpond.net.au>]

> :> i vaguely remember hearing about some old PC utility to read 5 1/4
Apple
> :> disks, but you'd have to ask some old PC fellas in a PC newsgroup about
> :> that.
>
> For the timeframe this pertains to, there was never such a utility.  The
> differences between the disks was hardware, not just format of the
> floppies.  I can't recall the specific names of the hardware mechanisms
> or encoding or whatever it was, but they were not compatible.  The later
> 3.5 Apple drives did read both formats.

It is only the format of the floppies. The 180k/side IBM MFM format and the
140k/side Apple GCR format both use identical floppy disk media.

The encodings are incompatible, yes, And the floppy controller hardware in a
PC is not programmable at the level needed to implement GCR encoding.

The PC drives are capable of reading GCR with a special controller card.
Evidence, the Catweasel controller which reads lots of disk formats in
standard PC drives.

Apple's SuperDrive (aka FDHD) can read 1440k (Mac and PC HD), 800k (Mac DD)
or 720k (PC DD). Also the 400k?

(Which used MFS rather than HFS. I read that MFS doesn't truly support
directory hierarchies, no two files may have the same name even if in
different folders.)

Ralmin.