dougm@pnet51.cts.com (Doug Mcintyre) (04/16/89)
Yes, the 3.5" drive itself can read just about any disk. What doesn't
allow reading of messy-dos disks is the IWM chip. It is soldered directly to
the motherboard of the IIGS, so you can't just pop in a SWIM chip and be able
to access messy-dos disks.. You may be able to pick up a SWIM chip in about 1
year or so from pre-owned electronics or some thing like that, but right now
there is a desperate shortage of them, even so that they don't even offer them
to existing Mac owners now (correct me if I'm wrong) they only come with new
macs now.. (and only the newer models..)..
Someone could clean up by doing three things. Interfacing a 3.5" drive
with a western digital drive controller to the IIGS bus. Writing a gs/os
device driver for the card.. and finally writing a FST for messy dos (the
hardest part.. Apple hasn't released the format of a FST, but they have
released info on drivers..)
Theoritically it wouldn't be that hard. They pretty much have one
standard chip used. Just some address decoding stuff to the registers, and the
chip takes control of most of what is needed.. I'm not a hardware hacker
though... This is what is exactly done on the PC transporter, and this is why
you can read messy-dos..
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