I've mentioned David Given's fantastic FluxEngine before, but I wanted to alert the community that as of the most recent release, FluxEngine can now write (as well as read) 800k Mac disks.
If you're not aware, FluxEngine takes a regular 34-pin PC floppy drive, and by hooking it up to a ~$10 development board can read and write many obscure floppy disk formats (as well as the more common ones). It's very easy to assemble - just take the development board (available from several online component resellers), solder on a single set of pins to connect the floppy drive cable, flash the firmware, and you're good to go.
I've been having great fun trying it out this afternoon, reading and writing DiskCopy 4.2 images. I've successfully taken System disks from, uh, "online sources", copied them over to an 800k disk, booted my Mac Plus from it, modified some files, then read the disk back into my modern setup and opened the modified disk in Mini vMac. It's great not needing to have an intermediary machine to transfer files between modern machines and 800k-only ones.
If you're not aware, FluxEngine takes a regular 34-pin PC floppy drive, and by hooking it up to a ~$10 development board can read and write many obscure floppy disk formats (as well as the more common ones). It's very easy to assemble - just take the development board (available from several online component resellers), solder on a single set of pins to connect the floppy drive cable, flash the firmware, and you're good to go.
I've been having great fun trying it out this afternoon, reading and writing DiskCopy 4.2 images. I've successfully taken System disks from, uh, "online sources", copied them over to an 800k disk, booted my Mac Plus from it, modified some files, then read the disk back into my modern setup and opened the modified disk in Mini vMac. It's great not needing to have an intermediary machine to transfer files between modern machines and 800k-only ones.
