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5.25 Drive in Powermac

Syntho

Well-known member
I have a 9600 machine. I’d like to add a 5.25” drive to it. Is there a certain make and model that a Mac requires? I’m not even sure a 5.25” drive will work on it at all but I thought I’d try.
 

waynestewart

Well-known member
Macs never used 5.25” floppy drives. There was an Apple PC 5.25” drive but I believe it needed a NuBus card. There is a USB adapter for 5.25” drives but it’s read only and you’d need to run OSX or linux. If you can even find one the Dynafile SCSI 5.25” drive might work or not. I have one but I only tried it on the Apple II.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
There were a limited number of SCSI floppy drives for PCs. I've heard of people having limited success getting them to work on a Macintosh as a generic SCSI drive.

But, yeah, it wasn't ever really a thing on the Macintosh.
 

CC_333

Well-known member
But, yeah, it wasn't ever really a thing on the Macintosh.
Well, almost: the rare Twiggy Mac prototype used the 5.25 mechanism found in the original Lisa.

I'm sure If someone *really* wanted to, some kind of solution could be made that would allow such a drive (or a heavily modified PC drive) to work on a modified production Mac.

c
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Well, almost: the rare Twiggy Mac prototype used the 5.25 mechanism found in the original Lisa.

Twiggy discs are the same physical size as 5.25" discs but are not otherwise the same: different holes in different places, different magnetic coating. The drives don't really count as 5.25" floppy drives in the normal sense.
 

CC_333

Well-known member
@cheesestraws I agree. I was just mentioning it because it's superficially similar enough to "normal" 5.25" floppy drives that it helps to visualize a possible way of implementing some modern-day solution to making a PC drive work more or less natively on a Mac.

What a sentence!

c
 

Franklinstein

Well-known member
There were a limited number of SCSI floppy drives for PCs. I've heard of people having limited success getting them to work on a Macintosh as a generic SCSI drive.

But, yeah, it wasn't ever really a thing on the Macintosh.
PLI made the Mac-centric SCSI Turbo Floppy 1.4 in the late '80s as a solution for using HD floppies on pre-FDHD Macs. Basically they were proprietary controller cards (for that turbo floppy performance) driving an MFM-to-SCSI controller board attached to a standard PC 3.5" floppy drive. Honestly if it was 1988 and I had a Mac II or SE and needed a high-density floppy upgrade, the Turbo Floppy was a better choice than the Apple solution: it was less than half the price of the official upgrade and it was portable, usable on any Mac rather than just the one that would have had the ~$700 upgrade done to it, so you could use the one drive on any number of old Macs, even the Plus which never got a FDHD upgrade.

Anyway if you were into hacking you could possibly find a Turbo Floppy and stick a 5.25 floppy drive onto the MFM adapter card. No idea if it would work though. And as mentioned there's the DaynaFIle 5.25 which supposedly did have Mac support, according to the internet.
 

ArmorAlley

Well-known member
How about the Apple IIe PDS card for the LCs?
They'll take a PC 5¼" drive, won't they?
Now, it won't work in your PM 9600 and I don't even know if the Mac OS can read from it but it may be the best way to connect a PC 5¼" drive to a Mac.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
On a Macintosh with a floppy port, I wonder if you could make an adapter so you can access UniDisk drives. I think it has something to do with voltage requirements, because I've read that connecting a UniDisk (5.25 or even the 3.5) to a Mac will fry something. But if you could electrically-safely connect a 5.25 UniDisk, then perhaps you could get 720K 5.25" PC floppies onto it.

But none of this addresses the OP's question, because none of these solutions save for the Daynafile would work on the PowerMac. Not even sure the Daynafile software would work past System 7.5.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
The LC IIe card had it's own IWM floppy controller and was only available to the Apple II environment. Even if it was visible to the Mac side, it would be limited to single sided 160k GCR formatted floppies.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
What type of drive are you looking to add?

5.25-inch floppies were never added to the mac itself and only ever existed as part of DOS or Apple II compatibility kits.

For 5.25-inch removable devices (such as CD, DVD, 5.25-MO, Bernoulli, SyQuest, DLtape/LTO, etc) drives, any of the open front bays should work.

For 5.25-inch hard disks, you can either use an open front bay (for any half height or third height drive.)

For 5.25-inch hard disks that are full height, your machine should have a plastic plate in the center of the base area. That plate is good for two 3.5-inch or one 5.25-ich disk, up to full height, although in a 9600 it will block some slots. (If I remember right, in the 8600, no slots are blocked. This plate isn't present in any 8500/9500 or before.)
 

volvo242gt

Well-known member
Yeah, the 8600 board is about half the height (width) of the 9600 board, so there's clearance. It's kinda weird that they used the full-size 9600 case for the 8600 board.
 

CC_333

Well-known member
Yeah, the 8600 board is about half the height (width) of the 9600 board, so there's clearance. It's kinda weird that they used the full-size 9600 case for the 8600 board.
They probably did it for efficiency of cost and manufacturing, because Apple was in pretty dire straits financially at the time, and they probably felt that having separate cases for the 8600 and 9600 would cost too much and be too difficult to maintain logistically.

Adding legitimacy to my speculation is the fact that, if I'm not mistaken, at about the time the 8600/9600 were released (late 1996-1997-early 1998), Steve Jobs' NeXT was being bought, and as the new CEO, he was beginning the process of streamlining the product line to minimize excessive expense and maximize profitability and efficiency.

c
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
PCI interface Xpanse Box for NuBus Cards -> NuBus Slot -> Apple PC 5.25 Drive NuBus Interface Card -> Apple PC 5.25 Drive?

Drivers have gotta be borked somewhere along the line though, even if you score the Xpanse box. I've got everything but the interface card or I might be tempted to go Rube Goldberg all over that. :rolleyes:
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
speculation

I think the 8600 and 9600 were finalized and on sale to customers prior to Jobs' re-arrival. It was probably just done in haste, but it's tough to tell where planning for, say, the next gen after the 7300-7600/8600/9600 was at.

Apple had started cleaning its own house just a little bit in 1996 and 1997 prior to the NeXT acquihire. Newton, QuickTake, ISDN stuff, video conferencing stuff, some Claris stuff, some other OS projects, some CPU projects, and a few things like that got killed. Printers, Scanners, re-badging low end displays. I'm probably missing a few entire corporations' worth of stuff. In addition to Apple trying to be everything to everybody the Mac lineup, they were pretty much trying to get into every business.

I do agree that it's very interesting that the 8500/9500 got custom cases and the 8600/9600 didn't. Maybe the mechanism was so involved it would have cost too much to design twice? (ignore that the beige G3 ultimately shipped in the proportions that would have been appropriate for the 8600...).


Yeah, I mean, if what @Syntho wants is 5.25-inch floppies, the answer is functionally an "outright no" on a PowerMac unless you can get the people who designed the xpanse, system 7, the 9600, and the nubus 5.25 dos drive interface all in a room to cogently develop new software or drivers.

All those things will connect but I think you're right, the drivers and interface software won't play nice on PowerPC. They may not even play nice on system 7, but I don't have the docs in front of me.

If I remember correctly, the way Apple's 5.25 interfaces for the SE and the II worked is that you'd pop a disk in, fire up the disk translator app and browse through it similar to if you were connected to an FTP server, then bring data over. Apple never set up those mechanisms to work with Mac data or be used directly in the OS. The same is even more true of the IIe LCPDS card. As far as I know you Can Not access that 5.25 drive from the mac, even for like imaging or data conversion.
 

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
I just knew it had to be borked on the driver side, thanks for elaborating on that. I couldn't resist the challenge of stringing the hardware requirements together. ;)

edit: on second thought, Xpanse chassis is the same for PCI and NuBus versions IIRC. Interface driver for either should work and be pretty much transparent to the host system and its OS? If so, maybe that takes the Xpanse engineer out of you imaginary room?
 
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olePigeon

Well-known member
@Cory5412 I wonder if Motorola had one with a PC floppy controller when they were developing their clones. Their Starmax had PS/2 ports, and using off the shelf PC parts would have made it even cheaper.
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Maybe, but if so it likely only had support for 3.5-inch disks and the question is: in 1995, do you think enough 400/800k disks had fallen out of circulation to make it worthwhile to do that?

Entertainingly, some of the Motorola sublicensee cloners (APS in particular IIRC) sold machines with an option to forgo floppy drives entirely, a few years ahead of Apple doing it. I imagine a single-digit number of them actually sold this way, though.

One other thing you'd need to solve for is floppy diskette polling. I don't know what PC 3.5-inch drives have for presence detection so that may not be viable and/or using it may be significantly more annoying than using a Mac with a real Mac floppy drive and controller.

In reality I suspect that the cost of the controller and drive weren't that significant compared to Windows computers. Having to get chipset components and/or entire boards from Apple and the cost of the PPC CPUs themselves was probably a bigger factor than some of the i/o stuff -- but it's an interesting thought point either way because it's interesting to think about what things we think of as being core to The Mac Experience you can pull out before it's too far gone.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
I don't know what PC 3.5-inch drives have for presence detection so that may not be viable and/or using it may be significantly more annoying than using a Mac with a real Mac floppy drive and controller

This isn't particularly annoying to rig up after a certain point in time.

I wonder if Motorola had one with a PC floppy controller when they were developing their clones

A third option: the outbound laptop uses a PC-style floppy drive with a custom controller, thus pleasing absolutely nobody.

fire up the disk translator app and browse through it similar to if you were connected to an FTP server

It was called Apple File Exchange and it used a similar kind of idiom to the Font D/A Mover, a two column file transfer thingy.
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
In principle, a board could be designed to interface a PC 5.25 drive to SCSI - perhaps based off the BlueSCSI project. You'd then have to write a driver for the Mac to read it.

AdaFruit has recently done some work interfacing floppy drives to their CircuitPython boards... so resources are out there.
 
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