From: toddpw@cco.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: Flopticals...any successful usage out there?
Date: 29 Aug 92 08:11:12 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena

lucifer@world.std.com (Kevin S Green) writes:

>I was wondering if anyone out there has had any success in
>using the new floptical drives (any capacity) that have
>been introduced in the past few years. I know, via a 
>report in GS+, that Applied Eng. is planning a floptical 
>drive for the // line but I would like to know of actual
>use of other makers' drives.

[ Y'know, I think I need to make a Floptical FAQ or something... ]

I seem to be the only person who actually has one of these things, so here's
the scoop (in brief this time):

There are three major types of "floptical" mechanisms out there. You can find
ads for all three in practically any Mac magazine. They are:
	1. 5 1/4" cartridges like the Next's Magneto Optical. These are not
really worth getting any more. Even Next is beginning to abandon them.
	2. 3.5" cartridges that hold 128 megs. These drives have been ISO
standardized, and they (or some evolution of them) are probably going to be
the next generation in removable media. However, drives still cost $1500 or so
so I don't consider them an option for most mere mortals.
	3. 3.5" floppies with optically engraved guide tracks that allow 20 mb
on one diskette (at $25 a disk, that's $1.25 a megabyte). These mechanisms can
also be backwards compatible with 720K and 1.44meg floppy formats. They do not
support the Apple specific 800K format. These drives cost in the $600 range,
which makes them much more reasonable an option.

I bought a drive of the third variety from Tulin. It was about $679 for the
drive, plus a Ramfast, cable, and one floppy of each density: 720K, 1.44meg,
and 20meg, according to the latest Incider. This price has come down from
when I bought mine. The mechanism used is an Insite I325VM, which supports
the SCSI Common Command Set. Unfortunately it plays rather loosely with the
time it takes to do certain things -- the Apple DMA SCSI and early Ramfasts
cannot successfully mount a disk in the Insite mechanism because they retry
a "what media have you got" request before the Insite is finished looking at
the disk to find out, and whammo you have an infinite loop until you get bored
and pop the disk back out with the manual eject.

Basically you need a ramfast with rom 2.01 or later to use the Tulin drive.
CVT does not specifically support the drive yet (but enough people have
pestered them so Drew said on Genie that he's looking into it, to get them
off his back). Somewhere after 2.00p but by 2.01e CVT changed something so
that the infinite retry doesn't happen when you insert a disk.

But all is not rosy yet. 20 meg media more or less works as advertised, but
1.44meg floppies have problems that CVT needs to iron out by experimenting
with one of the drives. There are really only two problems. First, and Tulin
denies this so maybe I have a flaky mechanism, when you format a 1.44 meg
disk the Ramfast crashes when the format completes and you have to power
cycle -- but after that it's fine and you can partition the disk and use it.
Did I say partition? Yep, that's problem number two. The ramfast currently
insists on a SCSI partition map (16k at the front of the disk) before it will
even let GS/OS see the disk -- this is a real pain because no other 1.44 meg
floppy system (including the FDHD) will recognize the file system on a floppy
that has been partitioned! I have explained this to CVT on Genie first bluntly,
then diplomatically, so they are aware of the problem. In fact Drew made the
comment "I'm surprised you haven't disassembled the ROM and fixed it yourself!"
because the necessary code is already present, for CD-ROMs.

Other than that, it pretty much works. I haven't tried 720K disks (I never run
into them) so I can't report anything about them.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ cco.caltech.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2