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Conference hydra::amiga_v1

Title:AMIGA NOTES
Notice:Join us in the *NEW* conference - HYDRA::AMIGA_V2
Moderator:HYDRA::MOORE
Created:Sat Apr 26 1986
Last Modified:Wed Feb 05 1992
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:5378
Total number of notes:38326

2170.0. "Making the MAC Connection" by HYSTER::DEARBORN (Trouvez Mieux) Mon Jan 30 1989 17:03

    There is a brief description in the new issue of Ahoy magazine of
    two new 'MAC' products.  One will partially format a disk that can
    be read on both an Amiga and a MAC drive.  I think that it lonly
    gives you about 200k to work with.  
    
    Another product allows you to connect a MAC external drive to the
    external drive port on the Amiga...and read and write MAC disks.
    
    I'll add more details tomorrow.  Is anyone as excited as I am about
    this?  (The first product is a MAC emulator as well.  I'm only
    interested in easy file transfer.)
    
    Randy
    
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2170.1LEDS::ACCIARDIMan Dies Laughing - Film at 11:00Tue Jan 31 1989 11:4019
    
    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. 
2170.2\BAGELS::BRANNONDave BrannonWed Feb 01 1989 21:1920
    re: .1
    
    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