I bought an old corroded Mac Classic Logic board to harvest the SWIM off of it. I was going to try to make my own Liron card for the Apple II, but I don't think that makes a lot of sense based on the drives it is limited to. I have a question though:
It is apparent that the Apple IIe needs the Liron and 3.5" Unidisk, or the Apple II SuperDrive controller card, to read an 800K drive. Each of those solutions has its own 65C02 and RAM to be able to cache data from the drive.
I though I might just be able to slow the drive down... I know the 400K drives from the Mac use PWM to control the drives speed, and the early Mac 800K drives do not, which causes a crash on the 64K Mac ROMs. However, the later Apple 3.5" Drive, (Apple p/n A9M0106) is compatible with a 64K ROM Mac.
Anybody know how they did this? Is the Mac really controlling the speed of the drive, or is it just sending the drive speed back, and still self-regulating?
If the Mac is really controlling the drive speed, it seems like this would be a good drive to slow down to be readable by an Apple II with just an IWM chip.