"Michael J. Mahon" wrote in message news:20031103134842.26109.00000275@mb-m16.aol.com... > Since my primary interest > was _reading_ Apple II disks, I would have been willing to re-read > several times to get a track read--a way of tolerating the timing > glitches caused by interrupts in the PC/Windows environment. If you just want to _read_ Apple II disks, you might want to try Disk2FDI (a shareware program by Vincent Joguin). It allows you to read Apple II 5.25" disks on a PC with no unusual hardware. I have been "playing around" with this program for a couple days and I have say that it does what I thought was impossible. It reads a disk and saves it to a disk image in about one minute (longer if the original disk has bad sectors). You do have to re-arrange the sectors on the image to make them usable in an emulator but every byte of data is there. In case you want to try it I found the following to work. Disk2fdi should be sector # -------- --------- 0 0 D 1 B 2 9 3 7 4 5 5 3 6 1 7 E 8 C 9 A A 8 B 6 C 4 D 2 E F F A couple other things to note: You have to have two floppy disk drives on your PC (only one has to be a 5.25"). It won't work on Windows XP/2000/NT. I don't think it will work on the flip side of Apple II disks. You can't write to the Apple II disks with the PC. It is supposed to work for other non-PC disks as well but I haven't tried it. Here's a link: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi Charlie Charlie wrote: >"Michael J. Mahon" wrote in message >news:20031103134842.26109.00000275@mb-m16.aol.com... > >> Since my primary interest >> was _reading_ Apple II disks, I would have been willing to re-read >> several times to get a track read--a way of tolerating the timing >> glitches caused by interrupts in the PC/Windows environment. > >If you just want to _read_ Apple II disks, you might want to try Disk2FDI (a >shareware program by Vincent Joguin). It allows you to read Apple II 5.25" >disks on a PC with no unusual hardware. Yes, I almost made a reference to his post, but was waiting for some confirmatory experience...which you have provided. ;-) >I have been "playing around" with this program for a couple days and I have >say >that it does what I thought was impossible. It reads a disk and saves it to >a >disk image in about one minute (longer if the original disk has bad sectors). > >You do have to re-arrange the sectors on the image to make them usable in an >emulator but every byte of data is there. In case you want to try it I found >the following to work. > > >Disk2fdi should be >sector # >-------- --------- > 0 0 > D 1 > B 2 > 9 3 > 7 4 > 5 5 > 3 6 > 1 7 > E 8 > C 9 > A A > 8 B > 6 C > 4 D > 2 E > F F This is the DOS 3.3 skew table (logical to physical sector mapping). >A couple other things to note: > >You have to have two floppy disk drives on your PC (only one has to be a >5.25"). >It won't work on Windows XP/2000/NT. >I don't think it will work on the flip side of Apple II disks. >You can't write to the Apple II disks with the PC. > >It is supposed to work for other non-PC disks as well but I haven't tried it. > >Here's a link: > >http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi His technique of starting a disk read on a PC-formatted disk, waiting for it to sync up and start to transfer data, and then switching on the fly to the drive containing the non-PC disk is quite novel. Does it work with the Apple disk in a high-density 5.25" drive and the PC disk drive a 3.5"? (This is a fairly common drive configuration on older machines.) Does his program convert the nibbles to normal sectors, or is that exercise left to the user? (I found his documentation rather cryptic to a non-Amiga person.) If the PC disk controller is configured to read only from the "bottom" surface, then flipping the disk over should work fine (since the technique already finesses the index hole). Many no doubt consider writing Apple II disks on a PC (which apparently is impossible) the holy grail, but being able to read them, however slowly, is quite handy. -michael Check out amazing quality sound for 8-bit Apples on my Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "Michael J. Mahon" wrote in message news:20031104195811.28612.00000173@mb-m05.aol.com... > Charlie wrote: > >If you just want to _read_ Apple II disks, you might want to try Disk2FDI (a > >shareware program by Vincent Joguin). It allows you to read Apple II 5.25" > >disks on a PC with no unusual hardware. > > Yes, I almost made a reference to his post, but was waiting for some > confirmatory experience...which you have provided. ;-) > >I have been "playing around" with this program for a couple days and I have > >say > >that it does what I thought was impossible. It reads a disk and saves it to > >a > >disk image in about one minute (longer if the original disk has bad sectors). > > > >You do have to re-arrange the sectors on the image to make them usable in an > >emulator but every byte of data is there. In case you want to try it I found > >the following to work. > > > > > >Disk2fdi should be > >sector # > >-------- --------- > > 0 0 > > D 1 > > B 2 > > 9 3 > > 7 4 > > 5 5 > > 3 6 > > 1 7 > > E 8 > > C 9 > > A A > > 8 B > > 6 C > > 4 D > > 2 E > > F F > > This is the DOS 3.3 skew table (logical to physical sector mapping). The author has updated the program (version 0.96 alpha) and it now correctly creates a DOS ordered (.DO) file. > >A couple other things to note: > > > >You have to have two floppy disk drives on your PC (only one has to be a > >5.25"). > >It won't work on Windows XP/2000/NT. > >I don't think it will work on the flip side of Apple II disks. > >You can't write to the Apple II disks with the PC. > > > >It is supposed to work for other non-PC disks as well but I haven't tried it. > > > >Here's a link: > > > >http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi > > His technique of starting a disk read on a PC-formatted disk, > waiting for it to sync up and start to transfer data, and then > switching on the fly to the drive containing the non-PC disk > is quite novel. I agree. > Does it work with the Apple disk in a high-density 5.25" drive > and the PC disk drive a 3.5"? (This is a fairly common drive > configuration on older machines.) Yes, this is the configuration I am using (I had to install 5.25" drive. I never had a use for it before). By the way, you need to have a formatted floppy in the other drive. It is not written to. > Does his program convert the nibbles to normal sectors, > or is that exercise left to the user? (I found his documentation > rather cryptic to a non-Amiga person.) Yes, it converts the nibbles to normal disk image sectors. It is a very easy to use DOS program (it will run in a Windows 9x/ME console window also). Now with the update, on my machine it produces a perfect .DO file that can be run in an emulator without any changes needed. I use a simple .bat file that allows me to just put the Apple disk in the drive and click on the .bat file image. Disk2FDI does the rest. > If the PC disk controller is configured to read only from the > "bottom" surface, then flipping the disk over should work fine > (since the technique already finesses the index hole). I questioned Vincent on this. He said that some older 360K drives will allow flipping the disk. He said that just reading from the other head reads the data backwards but the main problem is that the other head is positioned differently so you loose three tracks. Apparently "flipped" disks is a problem with the Catweasel card because he referred me to a site that shows a hardware fix so a drive can read a flipped disk. I found the information on the site to be cryptic but here it is if you are interested: http://home.t-online.de/home/indcomp/flipside.html > Many no doubt consider writing Apple II disks on a PC (which > apparently is impossible) the holy grail, but being able to read > them, however slowly, is quite handy. I have found it to be pretty fast considering what it is doing. A normal DOS 3.3 or ProDOS disk that is in good shape (no bad sectors) usually takes 50 to 70 seconds from the time Disk2FDI starts until I have a disk image on my hard drive ready to run in an emulator. This has prompted me to start archiving my old disks. I did about 30 disks this afternoon with no problems and these disks were 20+ years old. Disks that were copy-protected usually wouldn't copy but that was expected. Disk2FDI is supposed to work with 13 sector DOS 3.2 and 3.1 but I haven't tested that yet. I'm not sure if any emulators will handle 13 sector images either. Charlie