CompuServe Messages

I thought of it years ago. We made (and still have) some adaptor boards for the disk expansion port that allow you to use a standard drive as a real amiga drive; the interface monitors the write protect line (in hardware) and translates it into what AmigaDOS want's to see from a drive. Nifty little boards; and at the time, they would allow you to save a couple hundred bucks if you had an 80 track drive. It HAD to be an 80-track drive, because Amiga DOS assumes that if a drive responds to the poll sequence, it's a std 80 track 3.5 inch drive. Well, 5 1/4 inch drives work to (AmigaDIS didn't know, and actually there was no way to tell it) just as if they were 3.5s. Unfortunately, 40 track drives would NOT work as they would show up as 40 tracks of an 80 track drive. Oh well. <grin> Another piece of hardware languishing in the closet. I think we have about 20 of them left, still. I'd have to look to be certain – it's possible they were junked during a "purge". The boards were real cute, too – you mounted them to the last disk on the system, and plugged in a std IBM ribbon… and off you went. No fuss, no muss.