Interface information for 400KB Floppy drive

[Mac128]

Dog Cow, there is no way the UniDisk will work on a Mac with it's "smart" circuitry intact. It's the equivalent of hooking an electrically compatible Disk II.

As for the Lombard PowerBook G3 drive, Apple did not even sell a floppy drive as OEM. It was totally up to third parties to supply the drive, in this case, VST comes to mind. Apple was out of the floppy drive business for good by that time. Apple had for some time prior been using more than Sony to manufacture its OEM drives. At one point Apple tried to walk away from the Sony partnership to save money in the mid-90s.

 

[LCGuy]

That's likely. Apple probably got a different manufacturer to create the slimmer drive needed in the laptop. I noticed that the drive in the Quadra 605 (with dust flap and different head arm assembly) appears to have been made by a company other than Sony.

i've never played around with a PowerBook G3, but odds are it'll be a Mitsubishi - all the manual-inject PowerBook drives I've seen have all been Mitsubishis. Desktop manual-inject drives were made by Mitsubishi, Panasonic and Sony. I'd assume that your Q605 uses a Mitsubishi, since a lot of manual-inject Macs from that era have Mitsubishis.

 

[Dog Cow]

I'd assume that your Q605 uses a Mitsubishi, since a lot of manual-inject Macs from that era have Mitsubishis.

Yes, that does sound familiar. I haven't opened the Q605 in awhile to look.
@Mac128: the UniDisk probably didn't work, but I'm going to check again some time.

 

[techknight]

my original idea which i never started or attempted, but ill throw it out there for you if you want to do it this way:

My idea was to make an external floppy emulator that plugs into the floppy port, has some buttons, and a small 1 or 2 line character LCD which is cheap, and tons of C and BASIC AVR/PIC drivers out there for those 44780 modules. Then use either an SD card or USB stick to store apple floppy disk images, either disk copy format, or some other proprietary format for ease of use.

So you can push buttons on the drive itself to scroll through the list of images stored on the stick or SD card, pick one you want to use, then the floppy emulation loads it into RAM and takes over, mounts the disk as if it was a real floppy, and off and away the mac goes. Then when you eject, it takes the data stored out of the MCUs RAM, writes the changes back into the img file and dismounts it.

This way you can store multiples of floppy disk images onto 1 stick, and use either a C source of a mass storage driver for USB, or use a regular SD/MMC card. MMC drivers are already floating around for BASCOM on AVR/PIC but dont know about SDIO or SDHC. need to look around.

All this assuming you get floppy emulation working of course, or HD20 emulation. otherwise, replace the IWM chip with something of your own that emulates the IWM, and the backend uses your own protocals for AVR/PIC interfacing.

tons of options out there. just have to figure out how the macintosh ROM works with its IWM and the IWM standard in general, sounds like it would be much easier to write an IWM emulator than a drive emulator.