CompuServe Messages

I was wondering about that just this afternoon! Except I asked myself, can I simply use a PC 1.44 meg drive as a regular Amiga disk drive, with no hope or expectation of using the 1.44 M mode. After all, the higher density disks are detected by an extra notch. Is this switching done at the hardware level, so when I insert a double-density (regular) floppy, will it function like an Amiga drive? I suspect it's just a matter of performing a hardware hack that twiddles something on the drive select line – that's what you need to do to make a 5 1/4 PC floppy work on an Amiga. I got to thinking about this because I'd like to get a disk duplicator. There are machines available for the PC that are little more than a regular floppy disk drive surrounded by a nitfy mechanism that robotically inserts and removes disks. The whole apparatus is driven over the serial port using very simple commands. I thought, I could perform that PC-to-Amiga hack and the drive would work on the Amiga. But then I wondered, what if the drive in the box is the 1.44 floppy mechanism? (Any Amiga developers / publishers who have a line on disk-duping machines, please reply…)