#Amiga/Mac Drives
6 messages in this thread
I am looking for a utility which allows the Amiga 500 floppy drive to read
Macintosh 800 K floppies. Does anyone know of one?
Matthew J. Grossman
(Jay Grossman)
A standard Amiga floppy drive is incapable of reading Mac 800K floppies. This
is because the Mac uses a weird scheme which varies the speed of the floppy
rotation depending upon which track you are reading/writing. The Amiga drive
runs at a fixed speed, so it is incapable of reading most of the Mac disk. (It
is possible to read some tracks, and A-Max uses this fact for their
mini-transfer disks to allow transfer of about 170K at a time…)
–>Steve Bennett
Steve-
Well thats close, anyway. Actually, the Mac drives are now fixed speed drives,
rather, Apple -simulates- a variable speed drive by altering the bit clock when
during disk I/O. Also, I was under the understanding the Amax transfer disks
can read and write up[ to 272k at time…
Jay,
the Amiga500 floppy cannot read the Mac disks. The Macintosh writes at a
different speed on different parts of the disk, and the AMiga floppy uses a
single speed. If the Mac disks were a constant speed, such a program can be
written, but we cannot change the speed of these drives that much.
Betty
Matthew,
Central Coast Software markets a product called Mac-2-DOS. It allows the
transfer of files to/from MAC and AMIGA disk formats. Since the Amiga floppy
can't read the MAC disk format (as has been explained in several other
messages), MAC-2-DOS uses a MAC drive. The package is available with and
without the MAC drive (for those with a MAC drive already – or those that want
to buy a cheaper one). The package that incluldes the MAC drive is also capable
of using the MAC drive as another AMIGA floppy. Not so with the software only
package, which retails for $99, I believe.
Lloyd
Can't be done. The MAC drives read and write at varying speeds.
However, Central Coast (the makers of Dos-2-Dos) have come out with MAC-2-Dos
which will work. However, you have to buy a MAC style drive to use it, and the
total cost is a bit pricy — over $300 I think.
Ray Lewis