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.
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.
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.
@french_touch@fenarinarsa You wondered about the AY's /RESET being connected to a diode. This stops the 6522 from resetting the entire computer when it resets the AY.
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.”
This is a fun one because the .woz file was created not by analyzing a flux image of an original disk, but by the original developer's master maker program. Several years ago, a "friend of Larry [Sherman]" posted a collection of floppies on eBay which included several maker disks, the source code to several of his games, and — somewhat amusingly — pirated copies of Locksmith, presumably used for testing his own games' protections. You can download the maker disk here:
Trying to fix a Unidisk drive I've just got. The loading mechanism was completely stuck. The famous faulty eject gear seemed fine but broke as soon as I touched it... I don't have any spare, so I need to find one before going further.
(The Unidisk is a 3"1/2 floppy drive for Apple II that uses an internal Macintosh drive with an adapter card)