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