Here are a couple of thoughts on what such an emulator would look like and how it would work. I've spent a fair bit of time studying the details of the IWM controller chip and the floppy disk data encoding, and I understand enough to think that the project is feasible. Maybe that means I'm the guy who should design one. The idea of a floppy emulator for compact Macs (using SD cards or similar media) has been discussed before in the Mac hobbyist community, but as far as I know, none exists.
Floppy disk emulator for mac software#
You could also use a modem, null-modem connection, or LocalTalk networking to get software onto the Plus, but the average hobbyist is even less likely to have the equipment necessary for those methods than for the floppy disk chain transfer. To get Mac software onto your Mac Plus, you need to download it from the web using a modern PC, copy it to a 1.4MB floppy, move that floppy to the FDHD-equipped Mac, use that Mac to copy the software to a 400K or 800K floppy, then finally move that floppy to the Plus. That means if you've got one of these classic Macs, you also need a second, slightly newer Mac with a high density floppy drive (Apple called them FDHD) so you can copy data back and forth between standard 1.4MB disks and 400K/800K disks. These machines all have 400K or 800K floppy drives, and modern floppy drives are physically incapable of using disks in 400K/800K format.
Floppy disk emulator for mac plus#
While working on the "Plus Too" Mac Plus clone, I've started thinking further about a semi-related side project: a floppy drive emulator that works with actual classic compact Mac hardware (the Mac 128K, 512K/e, and Plus).
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