[Coco] MacOS was Re: AmigaDOS was Re: model 4 cp/m

[Joel Ewy]

Willard Goosey wrote:
>> From: "Richard E. Crislip" <rcrislip at neo.rr.com>
>> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:46:45 -0500
>>     
>> Woah! What kind of MAC emulator are your using???
>>     
>
> It's an A-MAX II Plus in an Amiga 2000HD.  Hopefully I can get it
> running soon.  All this talk about it has gotten me interested in
> seeing it live.
>
> It must have quite the floppy controller if it really can get a
> standard drive to read Mac disks.  
>
> Willard
>   
IIRC the Amiga drives aren't "standard" drives either.  I don't remember
the exact details, but I do believe that you can control more parameters
of the Amiga drive and controller than you can on the PC.  Here's a
quote from Wikipedia:

"The Amiga floppy controller was much more flexible than the one on the
PC: it did not impose arbitrary format restrictions, and foreign formats
such as the IBM PC could also be handled (by use of CrossDos, which was
included in later versions of Workbench
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS>). With the correct filesystem
software, an Amiga could theoretically read any arbitrary format on the
3.5-inch floppy, including those recorded at a differential rotation
rate. On the PC, however, there is no way to read an Amiga disk without
special hardware or a second floppy drive, which is also a crucial
reason for an emulator <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator> being
technically unable to access real Amiga disks inserted in a standard PC
floppy disk drive."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

So apparently getting the Amiga to read Mac disks is mainly a matter of
exercising the Amiga's floppy controller properly.

As a bit of CoCo trivia, note that on Wikipedia's floppy disk page, the
Sub Battle Simulator distribution disk for the CoCo 3 is depicted as
representative of the "flippy" disk.  I wonder who is responsible for that!

JCE