--- Pete Turnbull <pete(a)dunnington.u-net.com> wrote: WD177x, AFAIK, in the 1570 (single-sided) and 1571 (double-sided) 5.25" disks and the 1581 (3.5") drive. Right. They can do MFM, GCR or whatever because the diskette interface is distributed amongst several custom chips including a 4096-bit shift register in the sound chip. The Amiga reads and writes an entire track at once and parses it in memory. The MFM stuff is efficient because it uses the masking logic of the graphic chip to convert MFM to binary and back. With a simple adapter, you can attach Macintosh drives to the Amiga and read/write _those_ as well (800K with a Mac drive, and 1.44Mb if your Amiga has a C= half-speed floppy drive). There is a read-only demo version of the Mac driver available, read-write is commercial software. There's even a floppy-based network for the Amiga, but it's around $100 per node. I was just at the web page for it this week. RG-58 cable, bus topology, and you can still have three floppy drives on the computer as well. It's great for those bitty-boxes that have no slots. -ethan ===== Infinet has been sold. The domain is going away in February. Please send all replies to erd(a)iname.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com