Re: apple ][gs 1.44 superdrive

[Paul Schultz <pschultz@med.wayne.edu>]

On 8 Jun 1997, Willie Yeo wrote:

> Greg Berigan (gberigan@cse.unl.edu) wrote:
> 
> : Could it be the AE ones advertised a 1600K capacity while the Apple ones
> : advertised a 1.44 MB capacity?  I wondered about that at the time.
> : Should I go with the PC capacity or the bigger capacity?  Ended up I got
> : neither one and instead got more memory which I used as a 1600K RAMdisk
> : for my then BBS.
> 
> 	If I recall, the AE ones do not need the SuperDrive Controller 
> card for 1.44Mb format. It requires only a special driver placed in the 
> System Folder to churn the 1.44Mb capacity (It does not allow any other to 
> do the same though, i.e. Apple's SuperDrive or AMD's (?) 1.44Mb drive).
> 

No, the AE HD drive for the IIgs cannot do 1.4MB disks. The special
driver only enabled it to do 1.6MB. There are only two ways I know
of to use 1.4MB disks on a IIgs.

1. The Superdrive/Superdriver card combo.
2. A SCSI Floptical drive hooked up to a IIgs SCSI card.

Note that option #2 will not read 800K formatted disks. The 
floptical drive only will read MFM formatted disks.

Paul.

pschultz@med.wayne.edu
Paul Schultz