Am 25.05.2016 um 06:45 schrieb drlegendre .:
It may, in fact, be possible - with custom ROMs - to use the 1541 for other
formats. But it's telling that no one, so far as I know, has ever managed
to create software to 'tween the various 5-1/4" floppy formats, using the
1541 transport & hardware.
The 1570/71/81 drives have a dedicated WD controller chip for the
compatible MFM formats.
I doubt that even with a custom ROM it would be possible to cleanly
bit-bang MFM instead of GCR to the
data/clock port to the drive. With the GCR encoding home-grown by
Commodore there were no tight
restrictions to the data rates that are enforced by IBM compatible
formats; they could invent any rate
their hard- and software could manage.
Holger
On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 8:43 PM, Cameron Kaiser <spec...@floodgap.com>
wrote:
A fellow has made up a nice adapter to read and write Commodore disks on
a PC via USB using a 1541 drive.
The thing that jumped out at me is that this is a 5 1/4" drive that
reads and writes via USB. Anyone want to comment on whether the
floppies it accesses would be useful other than on the C64?
Could one do say 360K floppies via this hardware for other than the
Commodore? At least part of the work is done to do more than just
archival like Catweasel, et. al. do, in that it can also write.
The X*1541 cables (this would be an xum1541) still talk to the drives at a
relatively high level, since the 1541/71/81 family are all intelligent
peripherals. So:
For the 1541, which is strictly Commodore GCR, no.
For the 1571, which can do a variety of MFM formats, maybe, but I'm not
aware that OpenCBM supports that. On the other hand, since it's MFM, you
could easily just use something else.
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