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

[mkelsey@spam.eecs.wsu.edu]

In article <19980304050800.AAA15029@ladder03.news.aol.com>,
	supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes:
> mkelsey@spam.eecs.wsu.edu wrote:
> 
>>From what I understood, one could neither connect a IIGS drive to the
>>UniDisk //e controller nor the //c, simply because the //e and //c
>>processor alone would never be able to keep up with the data stream.
>>This all made good sense, until I bought the Apple II 3.5" controller.
 
> Correct.  When the IIc Plus came along, it was fast enough to use
> the GS & Macintosh style 3.5" drives.  Ironically, I am not so sure
> the IIc Plus could use a UniDisk 3.5 because of this.

My suspicions were correct about the Apple 3.5" Drive mainboard.  It looks
as though the mainboard inside the drive itself sends out the signal to 
identify the drive as an Apple II (and GS) peripheral, of which the Apple
3.5" Drive controller will recognize.  That and I believe the main-
board inside the drive case (I should have been more specific) also sends
a signal to the drive when the eject button is pressed, whereas on a Mac-
intosh, this situation is never encountered.

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?

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.  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.

It's not as though I'm concerned about losing this functionality.  By
seating the SuperDrive in the IIgs external drive case, I have gained
the ability to eject the disk anytime I feel like it.  Plus, the drives
aren't continually being polled either!  Maybe the 32k SRAM on the 
controller prevents this from happening?  I will have to investigate 
this further.
 
>>I tested out a Mac 800K drive, which worked fine with the CPS UDC,
>>and it wasn't detected.
> 
> If it is one of those old pre-GS Mac 800K drives without the eject
> button, the CPS UDC is the only Apple II controller that can use
> these drives.

Right, I am guessing this must be because of the "Apple 3.5 Drive"
signal introduced when the IIgs came into being.  I wonder if it would
be possible to "fool" a controller by giving it that signal from a
bare drive?

> Did you format from Finder?  Use Finder or another GS specific utility
> because you want to use the GS/OS Apple 3.5" driver.  This driver
> is aware of the SuperDrive while hard coded ProDOS 8-bit utilities
> may not be.  ProTerm, for example, simply refuses to format a high
> density disk in such a drive.

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."

>>Suddenly things became VERY clear.  Apparently the mainboard beneath
>>the drive (mounted inside the IIGS drive case) is handling tasks like
>>motor speed, and the likes, during a format command, thereby limiting
>>the drives capabilities.
> 
> Many have reported success with this method.  It might just be your
> formatting software.

Actually, I just had random bad luck.  Two high density disks I tested 
and one double density all verified with reading blocks with no lag
or errors.  I even tried writing to the blocks that "failed" during
the format and ran into no problems.  The next evening I took an old
ABIT Flash Bios disk, formmatted it, and suddenly I had a 1.44MB 
ProDOS volume.  It works great, so long as the disks aren't getting
"old."  I tried several other disks, too, and they worked fine.  I also
verified the other disks were bad by attempting a format in a PC.  They
failed.

> If you can't get it to format even with Finder or other GS specific format
> utilities, just buy pre-formatted Mac or PC floppies and use the Erase
> option from the Finder.  It takes less than 1 second and gives you an
> instant 1.44MB ProDOS disk.

I tried that the evening before I discovered it was a disk problem.  I took
a PC 1.44MB disk, copied blocks over from an 800k to make a "valid" ProDOS
volume, and "deleted" the disk using Copy II+.  It must be very nice having
a finder to choose the desired format ;)  Maybe I'll write one for my //e.
Fortunately the Apple II 3.5" Controller is "smart" and knows when I've
inserted the appropriate media.

-/\/\ichael-

replyto: mkelsey at eecs.wsu.edu