27 Feb
1999
27 Feb
'99
3:50 a.m.
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.
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(a)xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
2210 Sixth St. (510) 644-9366
Berkeley, CA 94710-2219