Re: 3.5 drive A9M0106 on Apple II

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

"Mirko" <mirko@yack.com> wrote:

>What card has to be used on an Apple II-IIe to connect a 3.5 drive ? Is 
>there an Apple 'special' adapter for 800 k disk ?
>I suppose I can't use 'standard' 5.25 disk II adapters (even those with db 
>connector...)
>
>I'm asking this because here in Italy from 1986 on, it never appeared such a 
>card on Apple Catalogs (probably it was never imported)

    There are basically 4 major options for connecting up a 3.5 floppy drive:

- Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card
Works with: Apple UniDisk 3.5, Apple 3.5 and Apple SuperDrive (1.44M)

- Apple 3.5 Floppy Interface Card (aka "Liron")
Works with: Apple UniDisk 3.5

- Laser Universal Disk Controller
Works with: Apple UniDisk 3.5, Apple 3.5, beige Macintosh 400K (M130)
and Macintosh 800K (M131), Apple 5.25 and compatibles.

- SHH BlueDisk Card
Works with: IBM PC 3.5 drives (720K, 1.44M, 2.88M) and 5.25 drives
(360K and 1.2M). Will not recognize Apple GCR formatted disks.

    There are some more obscure options too, like using the AE PC-Transporter
card as a floppy controller, or older, rarer and lesser known cards that were
on the market in the early 80's.

    There are several drawbacks with the Liron and BlueDisk, such as the 
"intelligent" UniDisk 3.5 operating at half the speed of an Apple 3.5 drive.
Looking at the BlueDisk, the floppy drives will need their own power source
and cannot read or write Apple formatted floppies. For that reason I would
recommend either of the other two controllers.

Mitchell Spector