Re: Anyone else have a floptical?

[mhackett@vaxxine.com (Michael Hackett)]

Marc Sira <toh@freenet.Victoria.BC.CA> wrote:

> I've recently picked up a used floptical drive mechanism without any software;
> this is not a huge problem on the GS, since the RAMfast with the latest ROM
> seems to do a pretty wonderful job of handling it. I noticed someone else
> asking for floptical drivers, however - are these for the Apple DMA SCSI card?

Yes.

> I'd also be interested in knowing if anyone ever bought a Tulin floptical
> for their ][ a few years back and received extra Mac or PC drivers with it. I
> haven't yet found proper Mac or PC driver support for this thing (an Insite
> I325VM mechanism) yet, and I'd like to use it to move files between my GS,
> a Mac, and a PC. Does anyone have any pointers to floptical support? These
> devices seem all but forgotten on other platforms (for me it's a cheap 1.44MB
> drive among other things, although sadly sans autoeject).

I picked up an Insite floptical a few months back, although not from
Tulin.  (Tulin did have a great sale on refurb drives, but I found an
unused one for the same price locally.)  Mine, BTW, does have
auto-eject, but no manual eject button (just the paperclip hole).  I
understand that the Tulin ones have both, although you can have the
auto-eject disabled (there was a problem with the drive getting jammed
if you killed the power while the eject motor was running).

The APS drivers that came with my PowerBook hard drive seemed to pick up
the floptical fine when hooked up to my Mac.  I've also heard that FWB
Hard Disk Toolkit includes a floptical driver.

I got mine for the same reason as well: it was cheaper than either an
Apple SuperDrive (even without the additional controller card I'd have
to buy) or a BlueDisk/PC-floppy combination, and it meant I didn't have
to add another card.  As an added bonus, I can use it with my PowerBook
Duo, which lacks a floppy drive and does not support SmartPort floppies.
I haven't even got any floptical disks yet!

========================================================================
Michael Hackett       Internet: mhackett@vaxxine.com    GEnie: M.HACKETT
Some Assembly Required    Voice: (905) 687-1729      BBS: (905) 687-9987