![]() ![]() The issue isn't the smaller heads, it's that PC floppy drives (when connected to "PC floppy controllers", see caveat at end) write at one continuous speed, while Mac floppy drives vary the speed, allowing data to be written more densely on the outside tracks than the inside. Sorry, but that information is incorrect. ![]() This isn't something that can be fixed in software, even if you could get around the different-spin-speed issue. Note that this "encoding" isn't data layer encoding, it's the actual physical method of writing magnetic fields to the media. Modern USB floppy drives are very simple controllers that only support MFM. The technical distinction is that Apple drives pre-1.4M used " GCR encoding", which, among other things, varies the speed it spins the disk when reading/writing while PC floppies used " MFM encoding" which, among other things, has a constant disk speed. It also means that Apple sacrificed some capacity - if they had stuck with the same formatting method for high-density disks, Mac HD disks would have been 1.6M instead of 1.4M. But the Mac "SuperDrive" could read/write both, partly because Apple chose to switch to the "PC-style" for the 1.4M format, to be more compatible. And PC drives can only read/write the PC method. It's also why Macs with 800k floppy drives can't read/write even DOS 720k disks - because they can only read/write the Mac method. It's why Apple called their 1.4M floppy drive "SuperDrive" - because it was a "super floppy drive" that could read/write both formats. Macintosh (and Atari ST, and Amiga) 800k format writes to the disk in a completely different way than PC 720k or PC or Mac 1.4M. Even with the "tape trick" it wouldn't matter. The issue is that a USB floppy drive is simply incapable of reading/writing to the Macintosh 800k format.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |