Re: Making Apple II 3.5 inch disks with a modern Mac

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

Lockar <lockar@apple2forever.DOTorg> wrote:

>In article <d8ksrn$qg1$1@skeeter.ucdavis.edu>, Jibbajaba
><cpalaimo@excite.com> wrote:
>
>> I have an iMac G5 running OSX Panther.  If I go out and buy a USB 3.5" 
>> floppy drive, can I make disks that an Apple //c+ would be able to read? 
>>   Perhaps using an emulator or something?All I am looking to do is 
>> download .sdk files and whatnot from the web and use my //c+ to make 
>> disks for my old ][+.
>> 
>> Possible?
>> 
>> Thanks guys.
>> 
>> Chris
>
>     No that will not alow you to make Apple // ProDOS disks.  You will
>need an 'old world' Mac in order to do that.

    The last "modern" Macintosh that can still read and write GCR-formatted
floppy disk, such as 800K ProDOS, would be the beige G3 series (actually
they're really platinum colored) or early Powerbook G3's.

    I picked up a desktop 233 MHz G3 last week and it recognizes IIgs
floppies just fine under MacOS 8.6. I haven't yet installed MacOS X (still
hunting for a copy) but I'd question whether it still has ProDOS support.

    It should be noted Macintoshes manufactured after 1992-ish stopped
using the Sony SuperDrive (easily identifiable by its auto-inject feature).
The generic IBM PC style drive that replaced them were a bit flakey with 
GCR support. I've personally not run into problems but there have been
countless reports of issues.

Mitchell Spector