Buying/Reading 800k Floppies


Thank you!

This is extremely interesting (not because it would be of any use to me, but because it is a technical feat someone has managed to code something like this).

I wonder why two diskdrives are required...

Back to topic: while looking for the answer to that I also noticed this place, which might be of interest to OP, ADFRead is based on another program:

http://disk2fdi.joguin.com/featreq.html

From there it looks like there is a disk based solution (with minimal soldering)!!! :

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Apple 400K and 800K GCR (Apple //, Macintosh, ...) disks reading to the DiskCopy 4.2 ".DC" format

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To benefit from these, the following is required:

  • A Pentium® processor or better
  • A free parallel port, preferably from a dedicated PCI parallel port card
  • A Disk2FDI cable that you can build yourself with the instructions available here, or that you may order on this site along with:
  • A registered version of Disk2FDI

Edit: Warning to OP, read the manual of this program carefully before you place your order. I downloaded it and the docs and though the "how" it works is starting to look a bit clearer it is also pretty obvious that things can go wrong. If you have an old Pentium era PC with MS-DOS for running this and a bunch of floppy drives to try with it is likely you can get the transfers done. However, if you don't, you'll need to build a legacy PC too...
 
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alternatively you could get a pencil and paper write down the data you wish to transfer line for line, and manually transpose this to the second machine using the keyboard.
 
alternatively you could get a pencil and paper write down the data you wish to transfer line for line, and manually transpose this to the second machine using the keyboard.
Hey, yeah, and in case it's something like an audio sample you can always use uuencode first :ph34r: . Beware of typos, though.

I know these are no laughing matters, since computers might not always follow human intuition, but I am somehow reminded of this incident from years back:

I actually have a relative who found the perfect solution for transferring text between two machines, only it did not work as he planned. He used two computers while migrating to a new one and wondered why copypaste between them did not work... OK, you wonder what that even means (as did I, initially) and why it didn't work, so to be more exact:

It did not work, though he tried several times and unplugged and plugged the mouse between those two computers each time :lol: . Then he called me. I managed not to laugh while I was on the phone :rolleyes: .
 
alternatively you could get a pencil and paper write down the data you wish to transfer line for line, and manually transpose this to the second machine using the keyboard.
Reminds me of something that I came across aeons ago - printing files as a sort of binary image, and then scanning and decoding (re-coding?) them on the new computer!
 
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