Re: Making Apple II or C64 floppies with PC 5.25" drive?

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

Brian Kendig wrote:
> I recently obtained some old 5 1/4-inch floppy drives for PCs. If I
> install one in my PC, is there some Windows utility which will let me
> use it to write data onto it in a way that'll be readable by Apple II
> or Commodore 64 (or 128) computers? More specifically, given this drive
> and a blank floppy and a disk image file of an old 8-bit game, will I
> be able to write the image onto the floppy such that it'll boot the old
> computer it was made for?

Almost certainly not. PC floppy drives almost always are driven by
single-chip controllers which support a "standard" format which is
different from the Apple II's formatting. The Apple II used a simpler
circuit to control the digital data stream to the drive. That's not the
fault of the drive per se, but of the PC you plug it into.

People have created special controller boards which can provide
non-standard data formats to the floppy drive.