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Home Forums 68kMLA Fuzix/Unix... Mac SE (lol) — #7
Post #7 by Gorgonops
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryTroubleshooting
Post DateFri, 30 Jan 2015 - 22:26
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/fuzix-unix-mac-se-lol.1062/
Post
I know about ADTPro and I'm curious to try the audio bootstrap.  But since this isn't an attempt to get software for Apple II specifically, but rather to test whether reading/writing is possible on this setup - with an IBM PC compatible 360 kb drive.  There is some evidence scattered sporadically and tersely around the web that the drive itself is capable of writing and reading Apple II disks.
So... you probably won't like the answer. Basically what it boils down to is that while the drive itself might be capable of reading and writing *some* Apple II formats (with some notable limitations, notably the inability to do "half-tracks" and a few other oddities that Apple II drives are capable of due to how their stepper motors are directly controlled by the computer) the PC's disk controller can't do it. There have been a number of hardware options over the years for enabling data exchange; an early example was the Central Point Option Board, more recent examples include the "CatWeasel" (discontinued and expensive if you can find it at all), "KryoFlux" and "DiscFerret", but I'm pretty sure the latter two are read-only. (IE, only good for acquiring images for emulation.) Another old home-brew read-only solution was "Disk2FDI" which required construction of a cable going to an old-fashioned parallel port to read Apple disks... which again does you no good if you need to write.

So really your only practical solution is ADTPro.... unless you have a IIgs. In which case you could go the *really* impractical route I used to generate a few disks from bare metal, which was to Netboot the IIgs from a linux machine using the A2SERVER GSOS distribution via an Appletalk->Ethernet bridge and use the disk image tools provided with it to write some images stored on the server. But, yeah, if you only have a IIe it's going to be ADTPro.

mp.ls