Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!haven!umd5!hans From: hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit Subject: Re: Can IBM R/W STANDARD Atari disks? Message-ID: <7414@umd5.umd.edu> Date: 8 Oct 90 23:25:18 GMT References: <1990Oct4.034732.536@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu> <109634@philabs.Philips.Com> Reply-To: hans@umd5.umd.edu (Hans Breitenlohner) Distribution: comp Organization: University of Maryland, College Park Lines: 20 In article <109634@philabs.Philips.Com> rfc@briar.philips.com.UUCP (Robert Casey) writes: =>If you have a spare Atari drive, maybe you could remove the Atari interface =>and connect the drive to the IBM PC's disk controller? Then the PC could =>read/write Atari single density disks. This assumes: that the drive mechanism =>and the board that lives just above the heads, etc. is enough similar to the =>regular PC disk drives. Also that you have a spare Atari drive, and that you =>don't mind wasting the space inside your PC for an otherwise useless drive. =>Assuming that any of the above can be made to work. Even if the PC can make =>the single density drive do something, someone would have to write a program =>so that the PC can find the Atari's disk DOS stuff (VTOL table, if I remember =>correctly). Anyone try such a thing? Forget it, Atari compatible drives do not have the proper interface in them to connect to a PC without major electronics design. This is definitely true for the 810, 1050, Indus, Rana. Percom and the SX551 may be different, but you probably would not want to sacrifice them. A much more straightforward approach would be to talk to the SIO port through a serial port on the PC. All you would need there are level converters, the SIO protocol is 19.2 kb serial.