Re: Homemade Superdrive?

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@telus.spamless.net>]

Dan Ratliff wrote:
> How hard would it be to cobble up a controller?  Some of these old
> Macs can be had for little or nothing.  It's probably not something
> I'd be capable of without a lot of guidance...
>
> From a website I found:
> "SWIM ('Steve Woz Integrated Machine') is the floppy controller used
> in all Mac II (except for the original Macintosh II, which came with
> the older IWM). As the name implies, it sends data and control signals
> to the diskdrive. In contrast to IWM, SWIM supports the MFM-format,
> making the SuperDrive (aka FDHD, with 1.44MB/ disk) usable (of course,
> SWIM is still GCR-format capable, in order to read the older 400/ 800K
> disks)"
>
>    Dan

There's about 70 parts to a superdrive card. It'd likely cost
considerably more to build your own than it'd cost to just buy one.
There's also a number of GALs that may be a problem. Then of course
a lot of traces are under chips so likely you'd need to remove a lot
of chips just to see where the races go. No so good for a one off 
project, likely only worthwhile if you were going to make a number

Wayne