Re: Quadra 950 Floppy Drive
On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 08:28:38AM -0500, lrutledge wrote:
> As I understand it the problem with writing a floppy driver is that the chip
> was not designed for such things. So Woz did some awful hacks and wierd logic
> in MacOS to make it use the chip as a floppy controller. So far no one has
> been able to work out the magic.
Well, there are some dumb hacks in the original Macintosh floppy controller,
but SWIM is actually pretty sane as I understand.
> Apple released the chip specs to someone, it might be the NetBSD-mac68k
> people. If Apple still has the MacOS source code they aren't willing to have
> someone hunt it down and release it, so there you go.
Yes, the NetBSD folks did manage to get some documentation on the SWIM
chip out of Apple, and at the time there was an offer to the Linux
community to get a copy, but noone had time to work on it.
> Looks like reverse-engineering is the only option again...
In this case, it wouldn't have to be completely reverse-engineered,
although since I didn't get a copy of the documentation, I don't
know how complete it is.
Brad Boyer
flar@allandria.com
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