Catweasel, Tim's Ferret, etc.

I am another one of the members of this list who is definitely not any kind of a techie, hardware or software. My best hardware effort was replacing a shorted capacitor on a Lisa I/O board. My best software effort was a couple of lines of 6502 Assembler to modify some program (I don't remember the details). I use an old Central Point PC Option board to read and write strange format disks. It can copy virtually anything physically readable by the drives connected. It will copy the strange TRSDOS 2.3 single-density disks, for example, and make working copies. The only format conversion software it comes with is to read and write Mac GCR disks. Otherwise, it creates a raw data image that can be saved. Someone has also written a program that converts its raw data output to Apple II format. The reason I bring this up in this discussion is that the device seems to do exactly what you are all talking about, and it is an extremely simple device. It has one large chip, a trivial amount of additional circuitry, and that's it. It goes between the floppy controller and the drives. Maybe it just provides the buffer you are all talking about, I don't know. In any event, before the wheel is reinvented, if any of you drive mavens would care to examine a PC Option board and its software, I would be glad to lend it out, to serious developers only. BTW, one of the included programs with the device is a track editor, which allows all the usually unseen data to be modified. My understanding is that Central Point was forced to remove this product from the market by lawsuits from software publishers, who alleged that its main purpose was to violate their copyright protection schemes.

Just a thought. Louis