Subject: Re: Mounting Floppies
To: Henry B. Hotz <hotz@jpl.nasa.gov>
From: David A. Gatwood <dgatwood@apple.com>
List: port-mac68k
Date: 09/14/2001 13:25:21
On Friday, September 14, 2001, at 01:13 PM, Henry B. Hotz wrote:

> At 8:53 PM +0100 9/14/01, Matthew wrote:
>> By your response, can I take it that floppies aren't supported in 
>> NetBSD/mac68k, still? (Just like to be certain...)
>
> The last I heard there was support for the SWIM chip accessing floppies 
> in 800K mode.  This is based on documentation for the Apple IIgs or 
> some such.  There is no support for 1.44MB floppies nor for 720K PC 
> compatible floppies.  Nor is there any standard support for HFS 
> filesystems so you can't share the floppies with MacOS unless you 
> install special utilities (and maybe not then).  Short answer: 
> sometimes yes, but not in any format that any other machine can use.

Heh.  Well, the MkLinux driver documents SWIM III, which is a superset 
of SWIM.  The known differences are:

SWIM I & II: no multi-track step (must do track at a time stepping in a 
for loop),  no DMA.

There are probably other differences in SWIM I, but I'm not sure what.  
Anyway, it might be a good place to start when figuring out additional 
programming information.  BTW, some of the later machines should use the 
SWIM II, I thought.  The 52/53/62/63xx family does, so unless they 
changed the cell, the Q630 should, and probably others.  And if they 
changed the cell, then that tells you how little difference there 
probably is....  :-)


David