Got this Unidisk drive a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I couldn't insert a floppy disk, so I opened it, did a full maintenance and changed the infamous shitty gear that broke as soon as I touched it.
The Unidisk also has a controller board based on a full 6502 architecture with its own RAM. That's because the 8-bit Apple II is not fast enough to control the floppy disk and it doesn't have floppy controllers, so it's taken care by this board.
As a result the drive appears as a high level block device to the OS and is not compatible with legacy software or the older DOS 3.3.
You need an Apple II with a specific card or an Apple IIc with ROM 0 or later. (also it works on IIgs)
And yeah there were third party desktop apps for the 8-bits Apple II, based on ProDOS. So full support for block devices, which means HDD, ramdisk and this Unidisk drive. To be honest it's really slow but it works very well and as expected!
The Unidisk is detected in slot 5,1 and format went smoothly.
It's a 800k drive = 1600 blocks of 512 bytes.
Automatic ejection is also handled by MouseDesk but there's no automatic insertion detect like on Mac.
It's pretty solid implementation to be honest. The floppy disks are daisy chained and the OS detects all legacy Disk II drives +the Unidisk drive. It's not as easy as it sounds because they're handled completely differently : Unidisk uses the Smartport protocol, which is a kind of fast serial connection I think, while Disk II drives are directly controlled by low level cycle-accurate 6502 code.
My Apple IIc has the patched ROM4X so it first tries to boot from the internal drive, then any Smartport device available.
My first Apple II demo, Latecomer, loads through ProDOS so it works seamlessly on Unidisk!
I also tried low level access. It's far easier than legacy drives because the firmware takes "high-level" calls 💕
The issue is that you can't really do advanced tricks because all the read and write logic happens on the drive's 6502. But you can upload code on it and even overwrite the firmware.
I don't know if that's really something interesting since very few Apple II owners have Unidisks 😅
STP, my FTP client, is now much more usable. It gets search, is ported to non-enhanced Apple II, and more importantly can now transfer floppy images (.po and .dsk) to a floppy, in the same way that ADTPro does.
This means that if you make yourself an STP floppy (with ADTPro), you won't have to unplug your Apple II from the Surl proxy and plug it to your ADTPro computer to transfer other disk images anymore!
This was distributed on cassette, which I normally don't include in the woz-a-day collection. But this was a "white whale" for @A2_Canada, who spent many years searching for an original of this 1978 game by Danielle Bunten Berry, who went on to a long game development career.
The game was shipped with custom controllers, but it is possible to play 2 players in the in-browser emulator.
What people say about it:
– “I will never use this and yet I love that it exists.”
– “Absolutely pointless, beautiful work here”
– “All the good features are included, such as unfollow and block, and none of the bad features such as account creation and polls.”
– “I set this up as a lark, but I’m kind of falling in love with it. It’s a different and surprisingly lovely way to use Mastodon.”