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Someone at Commodore should take a look at the new floppy drives
that Apple is shipping with the Mac IIx and the SE-30. These drives
can directly read MS-Dos 3.5" disks. Which are essentially like
Atari ST disks. They can also read, of course, Apple 400K and 800K
floppies.
It seems to me that if a Mac floppy can read MS-Dos and Atari disks,
and that if Amiga floppys can read and write MS-Dos (via Transformer
and Project-D utilities) than an Amiga should be able to directly
read and write Mac disks. Logical?
Even though the Mac floppys have bands of approximately constant data
density (made possible by varying the rotational speed), Jez San
commented that he could write software that performed 'quantizing
of the data stream' in a few days or so. He was chastizing ReadySoft
for copping out of being able to read an entire Mac floppy.
Ed.
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Translator One for the ST does do that I believe. David Small,
the author of it, is supposed to have a faster version of it available
soon (the current version is claimed to be slower than a MAC, the
new version will be faster).
I thought I read somewhere that the new MAC drives no longer vary
the speed, they use that variable speed write to do the same trick.
That would mean that Apple is buying "industry standard" 1.44Meg
3.5" disk drives and adding a fancy controller to get it to handle
MAC disks.
Getting the amiga to support 1.44Meg should be a bit more tricky.
According to the CBM hardware guy on usenet, the Amiga can't handle
the bit rate that a 1.44Meg would need. One possiblility is to
hang it off a SCSI bus.
-Dave
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