Re: Commodore drives can be controlled on Apple II serial!

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

mkelsey@spam.eecs.wsu.edu wrote:

>What would be even better is if a standard MFM PC floppy drive could be
>connected through the same means, although I doubt a stock Apple II would
>have enough horsepower to sustain the data rate.  Just how modular are
>PC floppy drives?  I presume the FDD controllers handle all the ecc-
>entricities and that MFM bare drives aren't as simple as ATAPI devices.

I am pretty sure MFM PC floppy drives' FDD controllers do most of the
work.  According to articles I read concerning the BlueDisk controller,
a PC floppy controller for the A2, that controller deals with the data rate
maximum of the A2 by letting the drive spin around before reading the
next block if two blocks could not be read fast enough.  Disks created
from such a controller would have a different interleave....

The SuperDrive controller buffers tracks with 32k of cache RAM, I
think, making it immune to the above problems.