Re: cbm 1541 drive reading AppleIIe 5.25" disks?

[john@gu.uwa.edu.au (John West)]

eric@telebit.com (Eric Smith) writes:

>> Now, both
>> the apple II drive and the 1541 drive both use gcr, so
>> this should be really easy to write, if one could get hold
>> of the specs for apple II 5.25"s.

>No such luck.  GCR isn't a specific code, it is a whole family of codes.
>The Commodore disk hardware is much different than the Disk II, and I don't
>think there is any way that either can read the other's disks.

Doesn't matter. All of the GCR decoding is done in software. The reason
that it is important that both drives use GCR is the recording density -
MFM requires twice the bit rate, so reading MFM disks takes a bit of
hardware hacking. Similar densities on GCR disks implies similar bit rates,
so there is a very good chance you can get the data in.

The tricky bit is sync (is it the same?) and the decoding software. We need
information on the Apple format for this.

John West