vintage disk drive dilema - to modify or not to modify

[Mike Willegal <mike@willegal.net>]

Hi Folks,

	I figured I throw this dilema out there as something that all users of 
vintage articles have to deal with from time to time.  I strongly 
believe that this old stuff should be used from time to time, but there 
are usually compromises involved in such usage.

	I am currently using my original Disk II drive which I purchased in 
1978.  Right now I am using it as drive 1 on my primary Apple II and it 
works fine, except that it does not do well reading Atarisoft game 
disks.  Unfortunately I find that those old time games are kind of fun, 
and I would like to play those games from time to time.  Unfortunately 
they need to booted off of disk 1 and my old drive has a "drive 1" label 
on it.

	  I suspect that I could improve this drives performace by increasing 
the resitance in the peak detection delay circuit to the standard that 
was used in later disk drives.  Most likely adding a 3k reistor in 
series with R21 would do the job.  This could easily be done by lifting 
one leg of the existing resistor and jumpering in the new one between 
the existing resitor lead and the solder pad.  If I did it this way, the 
work would be easily reversable without visible signs of hacking.

	A second option would be to put a more recent vintage drive as drive 1 
and move the old original drive to a second controller in slot 7, set up 
as an original DOS 3.1 system.  Unfortunately my desk space is extremely 
tight and this would greatly hinder other activities. I also don't think 
I would use the DOS 3.1 system that much.  This picture shows how tight 
space is.
http://www.willegal.net/appleii/appleii-bringup.htm

	The third option is move the drive to the disk 2 location, even though 
it is labeled disk1.

	The last option is to forget playing those atarisoft games, as 
everything else works fine.



	What do you people think?

	Regards,
	Mike Willegal