Apple external FDD on an Amiga A1200?

[Aus1200]

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?

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Aus1200

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.

prowler

[Jope]

GCR doesn't imply speed zones, it's just a way of putting the bits down on the media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Code_Recording
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modifie...ncy_Modulation

You can connect a Macintosh dual speed drive to the Amiga's A-Max II cartridge too for use with Mac emulation.

But like said, it is useless for anything but reading/writing Mac disks. You could of course take it apart and use the mechanism with a CatWeasel if you have tons of old 800k Mac floppies to archive.

[Aus1200]

Thanks for the info. I might just dump it up on eBay, see if an old Apple fanatic wants it