Re: Who still uses floppies these days?

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

thewises wrote:
>  >> I believe I have 6-8 5.25 inch floppies. I do not believe there is a way 
> to
>
> > > open the disks on a modern PC or Mac.  Or is there?
> >
> > If you have a PC, you can always attach a 5.25" floppy drive.  The
> > cables and connectors are still there.  ;-)
>
>
> Not really. XP will still recognize 5.25" drives, but most recent PCs have a 
> floppy ribbon cable that only has a connector for one drive. You'd have to 
> get a floppy cable with 5.25" connectors. Anyway, a 5.25" drive looks pretty 
> silly inside a modern PC case.

Silly is in the eye of the beholder.  ;-)

I have noticed that the dual-floppy cables are becoming a thing of the
past.  But there are still plenty around at thrift shops, etc.  I'd
expect that wherever you got a 5.25" floppy drive, you also could get
the cable.

> > > I know OSX cant read ProDOS, and I doubt XP can.
> >
> > XP can read ProDOS disks fine if you have CiderPress--an amazingly
> > versatile shareware program (Google it for details).
>
>
> Again, not really. CiderPress can only read 720k or 1.44MB(ie. MFM) ProDOS 
> disks. PC floppy controllers are physically incapable of reading GCR disks. 

Of course that's *mostly* true.  I use 1.44MB ProDOS disks and 32MB
ProDOS partitions on a CF card.

But, if you have two floppy drives (one can be a 3.5" floppy), you can
read Apple GCR disks using the program DSK2FDI--a remarkable hack done
a year or so ago.  This can be used to create a disk image file, and
then CiderPress can be used to access/manipulate the files.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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