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From: calvinc@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (Calvin Cheng)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Mac Floppies
Keywords: Additional Floppies
Message-ID: <1990Jul19.043349.4506@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 19 Jul 90 04:33:49 GMT
References: <11501@bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: calvinc@sandstorm.Berkeley.EDU (Jovan Pavle Mitrevski)
Organization: ucb
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In article <11501@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> ali99@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Mohammad Ali) writes:
>Hi! Need some help....
>
>   I am trying to connect a third floppy drive to a Mac SE/30. I am trying to
>   use the connector from the floppy which is already connected to it externally   ...but due to some reason it would not recognise it at all....What is going wrong and to start with can it handle more than two floppies....?? Please help!!
>
>
All Macs and Apple IIs are designed around the IWM (Integrated or Incredible
Woz Machine) and its direct descendent, the SIWM.  Both of these chips are
only designed to work with 2 floppy drives connected.  If you examine the
pin-out to your floppy port (nearly identical on the Apple IIs and Mac, not
too sure about the FDHD), to you'll find that one of the lines is a drive
select line.  This is what differentiates between the internal and external
or in the case of the IIGS, 2 external floppy drives.  There are 3rd party
solutions such as the Rapport that allows floppy drives to be hooked up
via the SCSI port but I think it's a really brain-damaged way of doing things.