USB Superdrive (floppy drive)?

[Scott Baret]

In this era, a common solution was to get a Mac Classic (often free in school surplus at the time) and use it to convert the disks. This worked both for iMac/iBook users who wanted to use old 800K disks or for people who used those newer computers to try to get shareware from the web to a Plus or other Mac that wasn't easy (but still possible with effort) to connect to the web.

 

[CC_333]

I am sure someone could rig up a way to use a SuperDrive natively via USB

Isn't that essentially what the KryoFlux does?

It would be neat to have a sort of device that would basically be, for all intents and purposes, a standalone SWIM with built in USB converter, but what would the point be?

It could offer a modern machine the ability to backing old Mac disks for preservation and write new ones for testing, without expensive hardware, such as the KryoFlux, which was fairly expensive last I looked (this was like 8 or so years ago I think, so the prices may have fallen by now).

c

 

[LaPorta]

It would be neat to have a sort of device that would basically be, for all intents and purposes, a standalone SWIM with built in USB converter, but what would the point be?

Just extrapolating the line of thinking the others are going down. I have zero need for such a device (as you alluded to), but it would be neat in theory. I have my AppleSauce with SuperDrive and speed sensor hooked up and have made Flux images of a ton of titles. To get anything to my machines, I pretty much use networking via a server, and then use native floppy drives to farm the rest out if need be.

 

[zefrenchtoon]

FIY: https://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html#varispeed

BTW, I was thinking about a software SWIM emulator to control an old floppy drive but where to start ...? IDK

 

[Phipli]

FIY: https://siber-sonic.com/mac/newmillfloppy.html#varispeed

BTW, I was thinking about a software SWIM emulator to control an old floppy drive but where to start ...? IDK

You would need to do it on a MCU or bare metal most probably, because timing would be absolutely critical.

Start with an STM32 or an ATMega 32u4? I'm no good at PICs or PIC part numbers, so @tashtari might be able to make suggestions if you're interested in that ecosystem.

Useful (check the list of docs, not just the one previewed at the top) documentation available here :

Classic Macintosh IWM/SWIM design documents : Apple Computer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Design documents and related documentation for the IWM and SWIM floppy controllers for the classic Macintosh and Apple II families, including documentation on...

archive.org

 

[zefrenchtoon]

You would need to do it on a MCU or bare metal most probably, because timing would be absolutely critical.

Start with an STM32 or an ATMega 32u4? I'm no good at PICs or PIC part numbers, so @tashtari might be able to make suggestions if you're interested in that ecosystem.

Useful (check the list of docs, not just the one previewed at the top) documentation available here :

Classic Macintosh IWM/SWIM design documents : Apple Computer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Design documents and related documentation for the IWM and SWIM floppy controllers for the classic Macintosh and Apple II families, including documentation on...

archive.org

I already asked him in a way 1 year ago when he was working on TashTwenty.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough skills in this domain too.

 

[zefrenchtoon]

I was dreaming of adapting this project to Apple GCR floppy drives:

Adafruit Brings Floppy Disk Support to Arduino Boards, Creates an Open Source USB Floppy Drive

Adafruit Floppy project goes beyond CircuitPython with an Arduino port, MFM decoding, and a USB adapter mode — with more to come.

www.hackster.io

 

[Phipli]

I already asked him in a way 1 year ago when he was working on TashTwenty.

I meant ask him what PICs to use, I only have any experience with ST ARM chips and ATMEL chips.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough skills in this domain too.

This is a problem that can be solved time to pick up an Arduino starter kit?

 

[cheesestraws]

I wonder if something similar would be possible for HFS 800k floppies?

I've had good luck with a greaseweazle for this purpose, though not wired up to an actual old Mac over USB - I just use it to make disc images.

 

[nightingale]

How were software disks mass produced at the time? Surely you didn’t have someone sitting in a warehouse swapping out floppy disks on a Macintosh once a minute running DiskCopy. Are there machines that can just blindly copy whatever is on the media without a care for the format?

 

[Phipli]

How were software disks mass produced at the time? Surely you didn’t have someone sitting in a warehouse swapping out floppy disks on a Macintosh once a minute running DiskCopy. Are there machines that can just blindly copy whatever is on the media without a care for the format?

They'd need to be designed to deal with Mac 400k / 800k disks. The mac disks aren't just different in terms of content, the data is physically laid down differently on the disk. In old macs the disk spins slower when working with the outer tracks to maintain closer to constant data per inch of disk medium.

 

[Forrest]

My opinion is Mac 400K/800K floppies never worked that well on my Macs that could read them. The read/write speed was low compared to 1.4 MB disks. Also Macs with 1.4 MB drives had no problems reading/writing PC disks since Apple started shipping PC Exchange/File Exchange with their computers. Phonenet was always the low cost method to transfer programs to Macs with 400K/800K drives. I’m hopeful TashTwenty will be the low cost leader for SD card storage, and we already have SCSI2SD, ZuluSCSI, BlueSCSI and PiSCSI.

 

[olePigeon]

@nightingale There were several companies that manufactured bulk floppy disk duplication hardware for both PCs and Macintosh. They came in various configurations. Some required a host PC that would control the device. Some were self contained (you'd put a disk in, it'd read it, save it to a hard drive, then write to disks.) Some were a single drive with a hopper so you could load up a ton of disks to be written one after another. Others were a large drive tower with dozens of drives in it, but they required a more manual approach.

What I don't know is how copy protected disks were duplicated. I suspect it required a host machine and in-house software.

 

[kkritsilas]

When I worked at a PC manufacturer, disk duplication was done with one of those dedicated disk duplicators mentioned above. The copy protection was copied, bit by bit, from the original file (from a floppy read into the hard drive of the duplicator), and written out bit by bit. All the bits were written out in sequence, so whatever the copy protection scheme was, it was written out just like the data was. And the duplicator machines didn't care if it was a Mac, PC, or Unix floppy originally, they all got copied over just the same way. The software to do all of that was built into the duplicator, and from what I remember, it didn't use standard floppy drives, they were modified (I think Mistumi) floppy drives with the electronics boards changed ( compared to the Mistumi drives we were using in our production PC machines). I know when a drive in the duplicator failed, we needed to get a drive from the company that made the duplicator; our standard PC drives would not work.