After a year and a half of hard work, it's out.
Head on over and take a look.
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Classic Mac Networking v4.0
- Thread starter Mk.558
- Start date
After a year and a half of hard work, it's out.
Head on over and take a look.
This is such an amazing reference resource. Thanks for your heroic push to overhaul it!
Great resource!
I got sent down a deep rabbit hole trying to dig up information on floppy disk alignment, which is probably about time since my SE/30's internal FDD isn't acting right. In doing so a bunch of information was added to the Working with Disk Images section, and like as before, you'll probably find some neat images to look at. Digging into the 720K HFS MFM rabbit hole was interesting, I had no idea that format even existed.
This pushes us to a total of 632 full-sized images in both documents, the previous version was about 322. It'll linger in its current form for a while, then probably slip into Final Release, where no new content will be added.
Take another look, if you have time!
This pushes us to a total of 632 full-sized images in both documents, the previous version was about 322. It'll linger in its current form for a while, then probably slip into Final Release, where no new content will be added.
Take another look, if you have time!
Off topic, but this is something that's been on my radar for a while but I've not found terribly much that seemed useful.. have you found any good sources that I should look at?
Happy to help.
Thinking about it, we need a wizard of a programmer to figure out how to directly access the floppy drive. I'm not sure if that's possible, I poked around technical manuals but not Inside Macintosh to see if such an operation is possible. If it is, we could use some kind of a reference disk made on a PC machine, and a small program on the Mac to tell what the read head is doing. Those digital alignment disks, with a long string of 1s, could be idea for that. It's more likely that a PC will allow direct access to the floppy drive, so we could write a disk that has track 5 full of 1s, track 6 full of zeros, and track 4 full of zeros. Then the program on the Mac can be used to read track 5, and we'd have to manually adjust it so it reads "in the middle" of 4 and 6. Sounds fun.
Thinking about it, we need a wizard of a programmer to figure out how to directly access the floppy drive. I'm not sure if that's possible, I poked around technical manuals but not Inside Macintosh to see if such an operation is possible. If it is, we could use some kind of a reference disk made on a PC machine, and a small program on the Mac to tell what the read head is doing. Those digital alignment disks, with a long string of 1s, could be idea for that. It's more likely that a PC will allow direct access to the floppy drive, so we could write a disk that has track 5 full of 1s, track 6 full of zeros, and track 4 full of zeros. Then the program on the Mac can be used to read track 5, and we'd have to manually adjust it so it reads "in the middle" of 4 and 6. Sounds fun.
@Mk.558 at risk of going off topic, have you by any chance serviced the floppy drive in your SE/30 in recent years?
In my experience from refurbishing dozens of Mac floppy drives, more than 90% of drives of that era that I worked on were restored to full functionality after being stripped down, cleaned, and lubed. I'm talking about the 800K and 1.44MB Sony drives specifically. The later OEMs (Mitsubishi etc.) have a higher failure rate in my experience.
Not to say that the Sonys will never need calibration. But you definitely want to make sure the mechanism is in tip top shape before attempting it!
In my experience from refurbishing dozens of Mac floppy drives, more than 90% of drives of that era that I worked on were restored to full functionality after being stripped down, cleaned, and lubed. I'm talking about the 800K and 1.44MB Sony drives specifically. The later OEMs (Mitsubishi etc.) have a higher failure rate in my experience.
Not to say that the Sonys will never need calibration. But you definitely want to make sure the mechanism is in tip top shape before attempting it!
Oh yeah, it's one of the first things I do when I get a machine. The reason I can tell is when formats a disk, or reads certain disks, it gets progressively "worse". For example I was doing a test the other day to format a 1.44MB ProDOS disk, and it got more and more "bad sectors" as it got closer to the inside to the point where it got stuck between two tracks cycling from one to the other because it didn't know which one was what, "seek hunting".
A problem we have now is we don't have any programs to help out with this, no hardware, it's not really been a problem for years and years. Until now.
A problem we have now is we don't have any programs to help out with this, no hardware, it's not really been a problem for years and years. Until now.
Speaking of the Working with Disk Images section, it might be worth mentioning that both Disk Copy 6.3.3 and ShrinkWrap can read and mount DART images. (You won't find too many DART images in the wild, apart from a handful of Apple-produced CDs in the early 1990s, but sometimes they are the only copy of something and it's useful to have a way to read/convert those images.)
The whole document is interesting and has an incredible level of detail! I did notice that "Hierachial File System (HFS)" is misspelled.
Fixed, thanks. Added two new images and two other links.
