Re: Help, please...Need cable or pinouts for Amdek III Compact Floppy 3" drive

[et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Black)]

"David Wilson" (mcs6502@gmail.com) writes:
> On Mar 23, 4:05 pm, "William Garber" <willy4...@garberstreet.com>
> wrote:
>> True, but some say 3.25" when they mean 3.5",
>> so he may have overlooked the fact that it
>> actually is 3". Just making him aware.  :o))
> 
> I did miss the size :-)
> Still, if there already is a standard FDD interface using a DC37
> connector why would you invent another one? Should be easy to check
> once I find the IBM pinout - about half the wires will be grounds.
> 
That won't necessarily tell you anything.  After all, just about any
floppy disk drive had half the lines as ground, as did parallel printer
cables and 50 pin SCSI cables and likely other things.  It won't
really tell you a thing about what counts, which is what the non-ground
connections are.

Ground pins on the "non-ground" side, ie some ground pins intermingled
with the side carrying other signals, would be a better indicator since
the chance of pin 5  being ground in that case is less likely to be
automatic.

The drives themselves are likely to be a better indicator.  Open the
box up, find the part number of the drive, and then find the pinout (which
at this distance and considering the lack of success of those 3" drives,
might be difficult).  Then trace those known lines to the connector
coming out of the box.  

I'm not sure why you're asking in an Apple newsgroup.  I don't recall
them being for that computer, and if they were, they would have required
an interface card, since they aren't the stripped down drives that Apple
used.  From what I recall the box had the drive(s) and the power supply,
and you connected it to a floppy disk interface intended for the computer.
 So they did sell the system as an adjunct to a number of systems.

  Michael