Re: Homemade Superdrive?

["Bill Garber" <willy46pa@comcast.net>]

In case you had not noticed I'll fill you in. The man who possesses
most of the quantity of SuperDrive controllers is now selling the drives
along with them at considerably more. Unless someone wants to part with
one which I know I don't, there will be none to be had. I have 2, was going
to sell one more, but decided that I might not be able to replace it, so I'm
keeping them both. Now to duplicate the Liron or any other 3.5" disk
controller might be feasible, but to dup the SDC would require using a
newer more powerful controller IC that does more and costs less. I am
looking into this, and possibly will need to modify other components such
as connection method and the drive itself. No idea as yet which direction
I am going, but please any negative responses will be ignored. Thanks
Dan, I'll work with you on this.

Bill @ GarberStreet Enterprises
http://garberstreet.netfirms.com


Wayne Stewart <waynes@telus.spamless.net> wrote in message
3E6D4204.1090006@telus.spamless.net">news:3E6D4204.1090006@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
>


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