Re: vintage disk drive dilema - to modify or not to modify

["josephoswald+gg@gmail.com" <josephoswald@gmail.com>]

On Apr 10, 8:37 am, Mike Willegal <m...@willegal.net> wrote:
> 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

One question, which I'm not clear about, is if this modification makes
it less likely to read any disks you care about.

Second, have you checked the drive speed? Maybe that is more crucial
than the resistor, and more likely to have changed significantly.

The third thing I would say is that even museum-type preservation
(which I think is probably overkill for Disk II that probably are
still around in quantity) doesn't necessarily frown on changes, simply
on changes that aren't documented and changes which are irreversible.

As long as you put a robust label somewhere on the thing documenting
(or pointing to documentation of) your change, even a museum should be
happy with it.

As far as a "Drive 1" label on drive 2: how many people other than you
use the system? Tag it with a Drive 2 indication of some other kind
(i.e. don't destroy the vintage label if you don't want to) or just
count on people to count left-to-right and ignore the label. Lots of
systems had these quirks at the time.

If you are worried about people other than yourself getting confused,
without you around to explain it, you should document all this kind of
stuff in a lab-type notebook, clearly associated with the system.