Re: A2 5.25" drive on a PC?

["josephoswaldgg@hotmail.com" <josephoswald@gmail.com>]

Scott Alfter wrote:
> What would be more interesting would be a USB-to-Disk-II dongle that has
> enough hardware (a 6502-compatible processor or core and some software to
> read/write/format GCR).  You could ask it to read or write a particular
> block and it'd do so.  For dealing with the various anti-fair-use schemes
> that were devised, the firmware for the dongle would be transferred in from
> the host at runtime so it can be changed from the default if needed.

This is the first post in this thread that made much sense at all.

On the other hand, the use of a widely available Apple II system with a
serial port attached is pretty competitive. And there are tolerable
development environments for the Apple II, versus a roll-your-own
system.

For a dongle to work, you still need the equivalent of a Woz machine
for your microcontroller to talk to the Disk II, and you need enough
RAM to store a sector or a track, and enough CPU to de-nibblize or
nibble-analyze if you want to handle non-standard disks. Sounds pretty
much like an Apple II with a nibble copier in that dongle.

The idea others mentioned of driving a Disk II directly with a parallel
port is just nutty. You need clocking (the Disk II controller uses 2
MHz) and a synchronizing circuit to get the read pulses to make sense.
You might be able to manage to talk to a Woz machine without too much
hassle.