Wednesday, March 14, 2012

I don't fully approve

I'd never advise doing this to a drive that wasn't irreparably dead, and I would actually think it would be a little bit cooler if the drive retained its original look rather than just being turned silver (though I understand how much work went into turning it silver), but—with those caveats—this Disk-][-as-external-USB-drive project is pretty cool.

Anthony kouttron diskii usb

[Photo credit: Anthony Kouttron; cropped and hosted here.]

Though it's "//c", not "2C", and the Disk ][ couldn't plug into a //c anyway, only into one of the other models with a 650-X104 card in it.

Which, come to think of it, makes me consider the possibility of creating a modern external device (perhaps CF based) that emulates the floppy drive's responses to the signals coming over the standard disk connection. With quarter-tracked nibble images, virtually any floppy (even copy-protected ones) should be able to be simulated this way, and with some kind of external selector to switch floppies, you'd have something that would work sort of like the CFFA3000 but would also work for the //c and //c+ (which have no other real option for something like a hard drive). It doesn't actually sound all that complicated, but it's still well beyond my current capabilities.

1 comment:

Jonnyboy said...

You may be interested in the Semi Virtual Diskette. It emulates 2 Disk ]['s in a little box. It's not quite like the CFFA3000 (I think you can only hold 1 disk at a time per drive). I have not built/bought this unit but it looks like it will work with any Apple II, including the //c (with a D19 adapter). http://www.thesvd.com/SVD/