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Old 03 February 2009, 01:56   #2
prowler
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Aus1200 View Post
While cleaning out a heap of old Mac stuff at work, I found an external floppy drive unit for one. It's model number is A9M0106, and doing a search it is a 880KB drive.

The connector on it looks very similar to an Amiga external FDD connector. Does any one know if this would work on an Amiga?
Hi Aus1200,

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I very much doubt it.

The Macintosh drives are actually 800kB, and they achieve that capacity by varying the motor speed so that the read head traverses the disk at a constant linear velocity, writing more sectors on the outer tracks than the inner ones. This type of disk is called GCR encoded and will almost certainly be incompatible with the Amiga's FDC.

These drives can be used with Atari ST machines, but they require a Spectre GCR Cartridge, which contains the necessary FDC interface, in order to do so. And even then, the Macintosh-formatted floppy disks can only be read properly while running a Macintosh emulator, or a proprietary utility supplied with the GCR cartridge.

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