Re: Hardware musings

["Charlie" <charlieDOTd@verEYEzon.net>]

"Knut Roll-Lund" <kr-lund@nogarbage.online.no> wrote in message 
2fKdnT5QaNiSj6DY4p2dnA@telenor.com">news:2fKdnT5QaNiSj6DY4p2dnA@telenor.com...
> Linards Ticmanis wrote:
>> Charlie wrote:
>>
>>
>>>The registered version of Disk2FDI does not need 2 floppy drives to 
>>>create an FDI.  It does require a simple 2 wire cable connected to a fast 
>>>parallel port. Many motherboard parallel ports are not fast enough, PCI 
>>>parallel port cards usually are.
>>
>>
>> Yeah, I forgot about that.
>>
>>
>>>The real show-stopper with the PC drives is that they can't read the back 
>>>side of most Apple II floppies even when flipped.
>
> I wonder why that is... maybe the index hole, the pc drive relies on the 
> index to pass?

Yes at least it needs the index pulse with Disk2FDI although I don't know if 
it is really used to do anything other than get the process started. 
Disk2FDI uses some pretty interesting tricks to get an MFM drive to read GCR 
disks.

Charlie