Going Floptical
by Richard Bennett
Copyright (c) 1993 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
As many of you know, five of us attended the A2-Central Summer Conference, affectionately known as Kansasfest. The last two days of the conference consisting of an Apple expo, which had a predominantly Apple II flavour.
It was here that we caught up with Larry O'Connor from LRO computer sales, who apart from finally handing over the Visionary GS I'd ordered two years ago, was selling the new AE Floptical disk drive.
This removable SCSI drive supports 720K and 1.44MB MFM encoded disks (the ones used in the MS-DOS world, and high density on the Macintosh), and 20MB VHD (Very High Density) disks.
After some haggling, we ordered four of the drives at US$450 each, with Andrew (Roughan, Apple II sub-editor at the time) deciding to "wait and see how they go", although more likely to do with the six month overseas trip he was planning at the time.
It was at this stage we came upon the first snag. Apparently the drives weren't actually available yet, however LRO would ship them to our hotel in California next week, free of charge. This never eventuated, and three of us were back in Sydney floptical-less.
Fortunately, Chris (Nelligan, AUG Apple II Vice President) was to remain in the U.S. for another two weeks, and arranged for LRO to send the drives to his hotel a few days before he flew out. This time Chris arrived back in Sydney without the drives, and we started to get concerned that Mr. O'Connor was up to his old tricks.
Finally, LRO shipped the drives to some friends who Chris had met on his trip, who hailed from Wollongong. They had stayed on a few days longer than Chris, and gratefully brought them back through customs. So a quick trip to Wollongong one night, and the flopticals were ours.
Included with the drive, was one 21MB floptical disk, and a 110V power adapter, which meant we had to purchase transformers to step down from 240V to 110V. These cost us $40 each.
The next problem was drivers. LRO had promised Macintosh drivers from AE, and IIgs drivers once they were available. We're still waiting. We contacted CV Tech, who make the RAMFast, and they said they had a floptical on order, and would work on RAMFast support when it arrived. So how were we to run it on the IIgs?
To complicate things, Cameron (Brawn, Apple II BBS sysop) and myself had a week of skiing booked, right in the middle of all these negotiations. Simple, let's take a IIgs and write a driver for the Apple High Speed SCSI card!
So being social types, our Apres ski consisted of Merlin 16+ assemblies and many games of Grand Prix Circuit, also known as "thinking time". (As an aside, it was a strange sight seeing a super-fast IIgs hidden inside a cupboard with four hard drives attached, a technical library to make most programmers weep, and snow dumping down outside the window!)
During the week, we were in contact with Chris in Sydney, who was busy organising the RAMFast driver, and had also contacted the manufacturer of the drive mechanism to find out extra details on why the Apple SCSIHD.driver wouldn't work with it. By the end of the week, we had a working driver written, and pretty extensive knowledge of the various bugs in Apple's SCSI Manager and generic SCSI driver code.
Unfortunately, we blew my drive in the process and it had to be returned to AE once we got back to Sydney (good, more games of Grand Prix Circuit!). Since then three of the drives have been returned for repair, and Chris will be sending his
back next week. Two of them had power problems, and the third had a bad mechanism.
Once the drives were returned, we learned that AE also sold a 240V adapter! So we ordered four of those as well, which cost another US$25 each.
Back in Sydney, I put the finishing touches to the driver, and we started testing. The first thing we noticed, was that it takes over 20 minutes to format the VHD disks, and that the drive was just plain SLOW at everything else. This we should have expected, considering that the manual gives a list of suggested uses, most of which refer to, or are associated with archiving data.
So should you buy a floptical drive?
Well for archiving data, they make alot more sense than 800K disks, and Archiver from System 6 will conveniently use them as a backup device. Unfortunately, you can now buy 128MB removable optical drives for around $1900 locally, which megabyte for megabyte beats the floptical hands down, however there are also no drivers currently available for the IIgs.
The ability to access MFM encoded disks, as used for MS-DOS, is not immediately obvious, until you consider the MS-DOS FST which Apple has included with the next system disk, System 6.0.1. The FST will be able to read MS-DOS files directly off the floptical, which re-enforces the Apple IIgs' lead in data accessability. I doubt whether the optical drives support 720K and 1.44MB disks.
On the issue of speed, while the Apple High Speed SCSI card is only just acceptable with VHD disks formatted at a 1:1 interleave, the original Apple Rev C SCSI card is ridiculously slow when formatted at its optimum 3:1 interleave!
One annoying thing is that the drive doesn't have an eject button. Fortunately however, it does have an eject motor, which the driver supports, and can be triggered through software. Anything that uses standard Apple calls to eject disks will work, including the Finder* OA-E command. I've included an eject CDA with the driver also, so you can eject the disk whenever you want.
If you are interested in purchasing a floptical drive, you can catch up with Cameron and myself at the monthly Apple II meetings, or on the BBS. Prices and local availability of drives are discussed in an article by Chris Nelligan, elsewhere in this issue of Applecations. And if you just want a copy of the driver, then let know, as I'm making it freeware.

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