Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!spice.cs.cmu.edu!mjp From: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: controlling the Amiga drive Message-ID: <1109@spice.cs.cmu.edu> Date: Wed, 17-Dec-86 17:37:50 EST Article-I.D.: spice.1109 Posted: Wed Dec 17 17:37:50 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 18-Dec-86 05:43:24 EST Reply-To: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi) Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI Lines: 41 Keywords: Does anybody know whether the Amiga disk controller can be made to read (and write) other formats besides Amiga's? In particular, the thought of writing a utility to copy files from Amiga to Mac disks and vice-versa interests me. Please keep in mind that the Mac disk drives are variable-speed. Therefore, one would have to be able to control the speed on the Amiga drive to write things a Mac would understand. The Hardware Manual seems very vague on this topic. I do know that if I connect a 5 1/4" drive to my machine I can read Apple II disks (big deal). I know it's impossible to do things from the Mac end because the MacPlus disk drive controls the speed of the disk itself...the system software cannot control it (unlike the orginal Mac and Mac 512K machines). Not that I wanted to write the software for the Mac anyway, but the variable speed certainly poses a problem in accessing data from the Amiga end. Another problem is that Apple itself is reluctant to divulge the details on how its drive works in the first place. The documentation for their file system refers to everything in "logical blocks" and doesn't say where things are physically located on a 3 1/2" disk (which makes sense, since the filesystem should work the same regardless of media and it shouldn't make any difference to an application programmer anyway) I just want to know if this is technically feasible before I start sticking my nose in a bunch of Mac documentation. -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Mike Portuesi | | Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department | | | | ARPA: mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu | | UUCP: {harvard | seismo | ucbvax | decwrl}!spice.cs.cmu.edu!mjp | | | | "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" | | --Laurie Anderson, "Home of the Brave" | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+