Those are cool cards.  It would be awesome if someone could clone them.  Not sure about availability of the WD disk controller chip or the Motorola 6844 though.

Those are cool cards.  It would be awesome if someone could clone them.  Not sure about availability of the WD disk controller chip or the Motorola 6844 though.

softwarejanitor wrote:

Those are cool cards.  It would be awesome if someone could clone them.  Not sure about availability of the WD disk controller chip or the Motorola 6844 though.

The people who are able to clone it understand that these cards are uselless, with limited software support, lack of drives, and not cool at all. 

I'd love to see how this DMA controller is connected to the AppleII bus. Is there a schematic for this or a similar card with the MC6844 available anywhere?

transwarp2 wrote:

The people who are able to clone it understand that these cards are uselless, with limited software support, lack of drives, and not cool at all

8 inch floppies are inherently cool, and everything we do here is arguably useless for anything but fun. There's so, so many 8 inch floppy drives in the world still. 

Also, I'm the people who are able to clone it and I'm currently working on cloning an SVA 8 inch floppy controller, cause I have the unobtanium SVA disks with the modified DOS 3.3 that they need.

okto wrote:

transwarp2 wrote:

The people who are able to clone it understand that these cards are uselless, with limited software support, lack of drives, and not cool at all

8 inch floppies are inherently cool, and everything we do here is arguably useless for anything but fun. There's so, so many 8 inch floppy drives in the world still. <

Cool is in the eye of the beholder and some people are just grumpy trolls who hate everything and criticize everyone else.  I hope you've made sure your SVA disks are archived so that other people can use them.  Your interest in cloning an 8" drive controller card sort of proves the nay-sayers wrong.  I wish you the best in making your project happen.

I always thought that 8" drives are cool and even though they aren't easy to find compared to 5.25" or 3.5" drives and are certainly expensive, it isn't like they can't be found at all.  They're out there if you are willing to look and pay for them.  The fact that they aren't common is kinda exactly what makes them cool really.  Normal Apple II clone drives are pretty common, albeit not as common as Apple branded ones.  But still way easier to find than 8" or even higher density 5.25" drives that could read MFM type formats used by CP/M and other systems.

Really, if the drive cards in question in this thread work with CP/M, that's probably the most important thing as far as most people are concerned since one of the primary reasons people bought 8" drives for the Apple II back in the day was for interoperability witth other CP/M systems.  8" drives were very common in the S-100 bus compatible CP/M machine era.  There were of course other systems that used 8" drives like the SWTPC 6800 systems, a number of minicomputers and other oddballs like the TRS-80 Model 2.  Software to interoperate with those formats is probably a lot more rare in general.

Interoperability software for Apple II computers, yes; but for PC users, programs like 22DISK can read the vast majority of CP/M floppy formats.

robespierre wrote:

Interoperability software for Apple II computers, yes; but for PC users, programs like 22DISK can read the vast majority of CP/M floppy formats.

I've heard of it but not familiar with it because I am not a "PC" user for the most part.  While I've occasionally had and used MS-DOS and Windows systems (mostly only when forced to at work) they have never been something that was a primary platform for me at home.  I started out on the Apple II, then went to Mac, then to Linux.  On "PC" hardware mostly of course.  I also used a lot of 68k and RISC based UNIX systems (Sun 3, Sparc SunOS/Solaris, HP/UX, DEC/Compaq Tru64, SGI Irix, IBM RT/PC and RS/6000, etc) back in the day.  Nowdays I am primarily a Linux user although I do have an older Intel based Macbook that I use for a few things.

Anyway, it is unfortunate that 22disk is apparently an MS-DOS app and not a CP/M one.  If it ran under CP/M then it might be able to directly do it on an Apple II with a Z80 card.  That said, I imagine you could use it on a PC to transfer the files to the right formats and then use an Apple II running CP/M with the high density 5.25" or 8" drives attached with an interface card.  A bit of extra "floppy shuffle" but it isn't like this sort of thing is generally going to be done for anything other than the fun of it anyway, so that's just more fun right?

softwarejanitor wrote:

robespierre wrote:

Interoperability software for Apple II computers, yes; but for PC users, programs like 22DISK can read the vast majority of CP/M floppy formats.

 

I imagine you could use it on a PC to transfer the files to the right formats and then use an Apple II running CP/M with the high density 5.25" or 8" drives attached with an interface card. 

But, of course, not. The dsikettes are accessed on a DOS PC with standard HD contoller with a standard 5.25" and/or not so standard 8" drive with the help of 22DISK software, the CP/M files of interest are extracted to FAT media, then via CiderPress are transferred to Apple2 CP/M diskette image(s).