Re: Reading Apple II CP/M diskettes

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <1168468723.339331.179780@p59g2000hsd.googlegroups.com>,
 <a2fan@hotmail.com> wrote:

> mc wrote:
>> Is it possible, in 2007, to read 20-year-old Apple II CP/M diskettes?
>> They contain WordStar files and my understanding is that a CP/M Z80
>> card was used rather than the native CPU.  I'm open to either acquiring
>> software or using a service bureau.   (Is there software for older PCs
>> that will read these?  I have a PC XT available.)   Thanks!
> 
> I'm not aware of any easy options, though this might help when it's
> finally released:
> 
> http://silme.pair.com/~goldman/deviceside/
> 
> Since these are CP/M disks that were created on an Apple II, you'll
> need an Apple II with a Z-80 card to read them.

The Z80 card is not really needed for this.

You can usen an Apple II without any Z80 card to transfer your Apple
CP/M floppies to .DSK files and then access the CP/M files there on an
Apple II emulator which also emulates a Z80 card, such as Apple Oasis.
Or you can extract the Wordstar files from the .DSK image using
Ciderpress and then run WordStar on MS-DOS on these files --- or just
load them into a plain text editor such as Notepad.

> Apple drives use GCR
> encoding, while just about every other CP/M machine back then used MFM
> (or variant). This means that media for CP/M on the Apple isn't easily
> interchangeable with the rest of the CP/M world (or MS-DOS)... so, if
> you want to convert and read the files on something more modern, you'll
> have to transfer them, via serial connection or other method.
> 
> I think there are a couple of people here who can transfer media...
> good luck.
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Schlyter,  Grev Turegatan 40,  SE-114 38 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
WWW:     http://stjarnhimlen.se/