On Sat, 27 Feb 1999, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Feb 1999, Bruce Lane wrote:
> > As one might imagine, this has a lot of possibilities for preserving old
> > boot and application floppies for such things as KayPro's, Commodores,
> ^^^^^^^^^
> > Apples, DEC hardware, and God only knows how many other pieces of gear that
> ^^^^^^
> > used floppies. The image files can be easily stored on long-lived media,
> > such as CD-R discs, and recreated at will.
> > Again, the only limitation is that a PC's floppy drive be able to,
> > at the hardware level, read the original diskette.
>
> But, unfortunately, two of your examples are NOT possible on a hardware
> level. And important formats, at that.
>
> In addition to the DRIVE, the DISK CONTROLLER (board/system, not just
> chip) must be hardware compatible. NO piece of software is going to be
> able to stuff GCR through a PC type of disk controller.
>
> Commodore made some PC clones; but other than those, the Commodore disk
> formats (Pet, 20, 64, 128, Amiga, ...) are NOT possible to do with
> unmodified PC hardware. The Amiga disks are MFM, but they have a sector
> header structure that is not compatible with the FDC. Compaticard will
> NOT provide the necessary hardware capability, although MatchPoint,
> CatWeasel, Apple Turnover, or CP Option board MIGHT. I doubt that
> Teledisk has support for Matchpoint, Turnover, Option board, or CatWeasel.
Teledisk will definitely not support the MatchPoint card. Since the
MatchPoint card requires the use of a special version of UniForm and
TeleDisk does not recognize it. I question whether it would support the
MatchMaker card (allows a DOS box to read the variable speed Apple disks
using an external Apple drive) either. Essentially, it appears that any
card that modifies normal FDC function and requires software to activate
it cannot be seen by TeleDisk.
- don
> Apple has switched to a fairly conventional MFM format for its high
> density Mac disks; but other than those, the rest of the Apple disk
> formats ( ][, ][CP/M, ][ Prodos, ][ Pascal, Mac 400K, Mac 800K ...) are
> NOT possible to do with unmodified PC hardware. Compaticard will NOT
> provide the necessary hardware capability, although MatchPoint, CatWeasel,
> Apple Turnover, or CP Option board MIGHT. I doubt that Teledisk has
> support for Matchpoint, Turnover Option board, or CatWeasel.
>
>
> BTW, hard-sectored formats are also hrdware incompatible.
>
> There are thousands of formats that are possible, but there are a few
> important ones that aren't.
>
> --
> Fred Cisin cisin_at_xenosoft.com
> XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
> 2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366
> Berkeley, CA 94710-2219
>
>
>
>
>
>
donm_at_cts.com
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Don Maslin - Keeper of the Dina-SIG CP/M System Disk Archives
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Sysop - Elephant's Graveyard (CP/M) Z-Node 9 - 619-454-8412
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Received on Sat Feb 27 1999 - 15:01:49 GMT