Re: Apple II 3.5" Controller and SuperDrive problems...

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

<mkelsey@spam.eecs.wsu.edu> wrote:

> What I'm wondering now, is if I place a logic high on the Apple 3.5" drive
> "pin" if the Apple II 3.5" drive controller will recognize the drive in
> a Macintosh 800K external drive case, e.g. bare drive without any logic
> board sitting underneath?

This might work, but I haven't investigated closely, so I can't be sure.

> The strange part is that on my Central Point UDC (remember, I have a //e)
> it polled the drives in Apple II Desktop.  With the Apple II 3.5" Drive
> controller, the drives are not continually polled, and instead, when I
> inject or eject a disk, the Desktop updates.

You will probably find that Apple II Desktop _is_ polling the drives,
but the poll is so short you cannot see it.  The UDC might be spinning
the drive up just to read the disk changed detector.

The IIgs Finder does poll Apple 3.5 drives, but the light blink is so
short you have to look very closely to see it.

> Next, if I drag the disk onto the trash, it treats it just like a 5.25"
> and re-reads the disk without ejecting.  With the Central Point UDC, I
> could drag disks onto the trash and they would eject.  This worked very
> nicely with my Macintosh External 400K and 800K drives, as they don't have
> an eject button.

Hm, not sure about that one.  Possibly a compatibility problem, as Apple
II Desktop predates Apple's newer controller card, and might not
recognise it properly.

> I don't have a "Finder" for my //e, although I do have Apple II Desktop.
> Apple II Desktop (MouseDesk) allows the drive to tell *it* what to do.
> If the disk is high-density, ProDOS will format high-density.  If the
> disk is double-density, it gets formmated 800k.  I would be curious
> to know how to format the disk 720k, if anyone has any information on
> this.  Maybe there's some undocumented commands when making a ProDOS
> format call...time to dig up "Beneath Apple ProDOS."

I had limited success getting the SuperDrive card to reliably format
720K disks.  I suspect it has a firmware bug.  The only way that
appeared to work was to format a 720K disk immediately after another one
was inserted.  I actually got machine crashes in some cases.

The ProDOS format call is not flexible enough to let the application
choose the format.  You have to use the SmartPort calls, and the
SuperDrive card implements a new call that was introduced with the ROM 3
IIgs.  The 'SetFormatOptions' call is documented in the ROM 3 supplement
to the IIgs Firmware Reference.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand