On Mar 21, 2005, at 10:19 AM, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
I am pretty surprised that I can't find any good technical
descriptions of
the Apple ][ disk controller. It's not in the DOS manual and, come to
think of it, I can't think of any publication Apple came out with that
describes it. I wonder why this is?
Does anyone have any good suggestions for reference material on this
subject? I've got Beneath Apple DOS, which is of course excellent, and
the Bag of Tricks manual (which rehashes a lot of what's in BAD), but
nothing outside of those really describes the disk controller
circuitry at
an even lower level. I want to know what's going on in the PROMs, and
why
the certain rules of encoding data are why they are (i.e. first bit of
every disk byte must be set, no more than one set of consecutive zeros
in
any byte, etc.)
--
Check out Aaron Heiss' Apple ][ page. Especially the Apple ][ tech
notes (posted
with Apple's permission). You'll have to dig for the disk controller
info.
http://web.pdx.edu/~heiss/
Mike