Re: Pinger INIT for Zip drives

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <33A44EB6.5762@MacConnect.com>,
Geoff Kaiser  <SuperKais@MacConnect.com> wrote:
>Wow. I didn't know Zip drives were usable on a IIgs. Can someone tell me
>if you need special driver software for this or does it just work? Does
>the GS format the Zip disk in ProDOS, or does it just read Mac or DOS
>formatting? 

    I encourage you to read the comp.sys.apple2 Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) at http://www.visi.com/~nathan/a2/faq/csa2.html It
covers adding zip disks, transferring files from other platforms, etc.

   Short answer: the SCSI Zip drives "just work" fine on Apple IIs.
[Caveats: neither the Zip drive nor the HS SCSI card doesn't provide
termination power unmodified, so you'd either have to modify it, or
make sure there's a drive that does to that in the chain. Also,
parallel port zip drives are out as long as there's no common supply
of bidirectional parallel cards] 

  You can format the disks for ProDOS or HFS and with the appropriate
FSTs in GS/OS, you can access either type of filesystem. MS-DOG
formatted disks require Peter Watson's "MS Dos " to reliably
read/write FAT/VFAT disks. [Not sure if Peter's added support for
FAT32 that 95OSR2's started shipping with, but disks in that
filesystem would be rare]

   If you're not running GS/OS (i.e. older GS or 8-bit Apple II), you
can still format and use Zip disks under ProDOS; HFS might still be
possible with some of the manual translation programs, and I don't
know of any MS-DOG translators for that type of machine.

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
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