Mac Plus used a variable speed 800k floppy drive, and to my understanding it is impossible to read those disks on anything else than a mac with built-in floppy drive.

CrFr wrote on 2023-09-27, 20:47:

Mac Plus used a variable speed 800k floppy drive, and to my understanding it is impossible to read those disks on anything else than a mac with built-in floppy drive.

This is correct - best advice for the OP, if you have files you care about on Mac floppies, get a beige G3 - that's the last Mac with the Apple "SuperDrive" floppy drive and the SWIM controller that can do the 800K format. And the beige G3 has reasonably 'modern' connectivity options to get the files off the Mac...

Otherwise, you could take any Mac with the "SuperDrive" (any beige Mac launched post-1988), copy the files from an 800K floppy to a 1.4 meg floppy, and off you go. The hardware format for the 1.4 meg disks is the same as used by PC, so any software that can read HFS can read those disks in any generic PC floppy drive.

That being said, I would urge the OP to think carefully about formats, too. If you have, say, files in MacWrite format, you're probably better off trying to convert those to something more cross-platform on a beige Mac and that may be a multi-step process. e.g. MacWrite -> older Word for Mac format -> newer Word format with better cross-platform compatibility. Quite honestly, I do not know how easy opening any files from the 800K Mac era on a modern system would be - this is an era where, for example, PageMaker 4.0 would open PageMaker 3.0 files, but not 1.x or 2.0 files. And... I don't know whether, say, a document from Word 4 or 5.1a for Mac can be opened in a modern version of MS Word, either for Mac or Windows. And, when you're dealing with classic Mac stuff, you always need to think about resource forks/data forks, character set issues (this is the pre-Unicode era...), etc.

The other thing I might actually suggest - find a Mac collector with working beige Macs to help you out. The beige Macs are... not easy... to get into at this point, requiring ADB keyboards/mice, DB-15 monitors (or adapters), potentially AAUI transceivers to get them on Ethernet networks, etc. If all you have is a few floppies, might be a lot easier to find someone who already has all that equipment in good shape to help you out.

(I actually had some orphaned Mac files on 800K floppies, but randomly bought a Mac IIsi at a neighbour's garage sale in summer 2001. Used that to do the disk/file conversions and get the data over to Windows machines. In a way it would be easier to do now that all the relevant software is abandonware on places like Macintosh Garden...)

I don't know how well it's been maintained in the last 20 years (but hey, he has an ARM64 version for Windows, so he must still be around), but how about something like WinImage?

As I said in my earlier reply about the Mac aspect, though, you may want to think very carefully about file formats. For DOS/Windows stuff, it's not as bad as for Mac stuff, because you can always virtualize things to run random old software more easily (although... I guess there are Mac emulators that are pretty good these days, especially for 68K), but you may want to look at converting your data to modern file formats while you are doing this.

(I actually did something quite similar to you with my collection of floppies oh, around 2010 or so, although I wasn't concerned about metadata preservation, etc, so I didn't look at imaging, just copied all the data over to a network drive that eventually landed on my current NAS and it's worth noting, there's a whole bunch of things in formats that aren't exactly easy to open today. e.g. documents in MS Works... 3 or 4... WPS format. Word could barely open those back in the day and they dropped support for importing older "unsafe" file formats a long time ago... so... good chance that trying to open at least some of that stuff requires setting up a VM with something like 98SE and who knows what software)

CrFr wrote on 2023-09-27, 20:47:

Mac Plus used a variable speed 800k floppy drive, and to my understanding it is impossible to read those disks on anything else than a mac with built-in floppy drive.

Huh, now I am confused. I have vague memories of many years ago using a Mac emulator on my Windows 95 or 98 PC to read those disks. But I might be mis-remembering.

Regardless though, if I remember correctly there was just a few random programs and screensavers on those so they are not a priority if I can't read those.

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-27, 21:14:

Otherwise, you could take any Mac with the "SuperDrive" (any beige Mac launched post-1988), copy the files from an 800K floppy to a 1.4 meg floppy, and off you go. The hardware format for the 1.4 meg disks is the same as used by PC, so any software that can read HFS can read those disks in any generic PC floppy drive.

Wait, such a thing as 800K floppies for Macs existed? I thought people meant they were 720K floppies that macs format as 800K. These were originally 1.44M floppies that I formatted on said Mac to whatever format the Mac used. All of these floppies physically are 720K or 1.44M floppies, vast majority being 1.44M, but I know that some were formatted on a Mac and there might be others that were formatted something other than DOS's standard FAT12.

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-27, 21:24:

I don't know how well it's been maintained in the last 20 years (but hey, he has an ARM64 version for Windows, so he must still be around), but how about something like WinImage?

Would that be ideal for trying to create backup images of your floppies? I have only used WinImage a little, but isn't that more of a simpler program just for writing an image to a disk or reading it off? Would it be able to handle anything not DOS-formatted or if there are any damaged sectors or possibly deleted files that can be recovered or so?

As I said in my earlier reply about the Mac aspect, though, you may want to think very carefully about file formats. For DOS/Windows stuff, it's not as bad as for Mac stuff, because you can always virtualize things to run random old software more easily (although... I guess there are Mac emulators that are pretty good these days, especially for 68K), but you may want to look at converting your data to modern file formats while you are doing this.

If I remember correctly, the majority of the contents of these disks are going to be standard files like txt, images, zip, etc (and a few proprietary formats that only the program that made them can run and would not be standard media anyway, like custom levels for a game I made as a child) or very old programs. Not really as concerned for backing up most of the programs/games since I am sure those are incredibly easy to find on the internet these days anyway, aside from a few random old shareware or other oddware that I haven't been able to find any information for online.

Cyber Akuma wrote on 2023-09-27, 23:00:

Wait, such a thing as 800K floppies for Macs existed? I thought people meant they were 720K floppies that macs format as 800K. These were originally 1.44M floppies that I formatted on said Mac to whatever format the Mac used. All of these floppies physically are 720K or 1.44M floppies, vast majority being 1.44M, but I know that some were formatted on a Mac and there might be others that were formatted something other than DOS's standard FAT12.

Manufacturers called them 1M and 2M. (Unformatted) ofc.

Cyber Akuma wrote on 2023-09-27, 23:00:

Huh, now I am confused. I have vague memories of many years ago using a Mac emulator on my Windows 95 or 98 PC to read those dis […]
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CrFr wrote on 2023-09-27, 20:47:

Mac Plus used a variable speed 800k floppy drive, and to my understanding it is impossible to read those disks on anything else than a mac with built-in floppy drive.

Huh, now I am confused. I have vague memories of many years ago using a Mac emulator on my Windows 95 or 98 PC to read those disks. But I might be mis-remembering.

Regardless though, if I remember correctly there was just a few random programs and screensavers on those so they are not a priority if I can't read those.

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-27, 21:14:

Otherwise, you could take any Mac with the "SuperDrive" (any beige Mac launched post-1988), copy the files from an 800K floppy to a 1.4 meg floppy, and off you go. The hardware format for the 1.4 meg disks is the same as used by PC, so any software that can read HFS can read those disks in any generic PC floppy drive.

Wait, such a thing as 800K floppies for Macs existed? I thought people meant they were 720K floppies that macs format as 800K. These were originally 1.44M floppies that I formatted on said Mac to whatever format the Mac used. All of these floppies physically are 720K or 1.44M floppies, vast majority being 1.44M, but I know that some were formatted on a Mac and there might be others that were formatted something other than DOS's standard FAT12.

Okay, so here's the thing. There's file systems, which are software, and there's the encoding, which is a function of hardware, how the hardware can tell the heads to move, etc.

If you take a DS/DD floppy, unformatted capacity "1 meg", if you format it using a DOS machine, it uses the MFM encoding and the FAT12 file system, and you get 720K. If you take the same floppy and put it into a Mac, it will use the GCR encoding and the HFS file system, and you get 800K.

The GCR and MFM encodings are not compatible because they rely on different hardware. You need a descendent of Steve Wozniak's disk controller to do GCR.

Then, Apple realized that this was becoming a problem and they invented their "SuperDrive" along with their "SWIM" disk controller and they adopted MFM for DS/HD (2 meg unformatted capacity high-density floppy) instead of sticking with GCR.

The SuperDrive/SWIM can read MFM DS/DD "720K" floppies and, if the Mac has the PC Exchange software or other FAT12 software, read the data off a FAT file system. The SuperDrive can read GCR DS/DD "800K" floppies. And it can read MFM 1.4 meg floppies in HFS file system, or with PC Exchange, in FAT12 file system.

The DS/HD floppies all use MFM, so if you insert them into a standard 1.44 meg PC floppy drive, you just need software to read the file system, and you're good to go.

This is also why all the external USB floppy drives sold for use with iMacs only support DS/HD 1.4 meg disks - they don't have the Wozniak disk controller, so they can't do GCR, so even though the classic MacOS can read HFS just fine, oops. MFM only. And it's also why, if you get an external 1.4 meg floppy drive and plug it into an older Mac without the SWIM chip, that drive will only read 800K GCR disks and not any MFM disks, including 1.4 meg Mac disks.

So, the bottom line is this:
- if you have a pre-SuperDrive Apple drive, it can only read GCR floppies. You can throw all the PC Exchange, Apple File Exchange, etc software you want at your 800K Mac (e.g. SE/II), it can't do MFM encoding and you're stuck. Data exchange between PC and Mac was... a lot more challenging... in those days, in fact people used to do serial port transfers to a PC over a null-modem cable. I think Apple also had a product around 1988 that was a NuBus card with an MFM controller and a 5.25" external drive you could put in your Mac II.
- if you have a PC floppy drive, it can only do MFM encoding, so it will read a DS/HD Mac floppy just fine, assuming you have software that can read HFS file system, but it will never be able to read an 800K GCR DS/DD disk
- if you have a beige Mac with a SuperDrive, you have full backwards compatibility with GCR 400/800K SS/DD and DS/DD floppies, and you have full compatibility with MFM 720K and MFM 1.4 megs.

If you were able to use your Mac disks in a non-Apple floppy drive/controller, then they are 1.4 meg high density disks.

And, this is exactly what I did with my 800K and my IIsi 22 years ago - copy from 800K GCR to the IIsi's hard drive, put in a 1.4 meg MFM floppy, either write FAT12 on the Mac using PC Exchange (if your system software version is new enough to include PC Exchange, it used to be a standalone product before 7.5, I think), or write HFS on the Mac, put it into a PC, then use HFS software to read the 1.4 meg floppy and extract the data that way.

(I am not an Apple II guy, but I think the same would be even more true there - you can't read a GCR 5.25" floppy disk in an IBM-compatible 5.25" drive and vice versa)

Disruptor wrote on 2023-09-27, 23:37:

Cyber Akuma wrote on 2023-09-27, 23:00:

Wait, such a thing as 800K floppies for Macs existed? I thought people meant they were 720K floppies that macs format as 800K. These were originally 1.44M floppies that I formatted on said Mac to whatever format the Mac used. All of these floppies physically are 720K or 1.44M floppies, vast majority being 1.44M, but I know that some were formatted on a Mac and there might be others that were formatted something other than DOS's standard FAT12.

Manufacturers called them 1M and 2M. (Unformatted) ofc.

There were three floppy disk types for 3.5:
- single-sided, dual density - those format at 400K in GCR on a Mac, and I was too young to ever see them in a store so I don't know how they were labelled. I also suspect these were never used in DOS machines, only early Macs from 1984-5
- double-sided, dual density - those are labelled as 1 meg unformatted, format 800K in a Mac using GCR (and HFS), 720K in a DOS machine using MFM. Note that these disks are 100% compatible with the single-sided drives (which will just use only one side), which may explain why the single-sided disks vanished from the marketplace quickly
- double-sided, high density - those are labelled as 2 meg unformatted, format 1.4/1.44 meg in both Macs and DOS machines using MFM. (I forget whether it's 1.4 in DOS/FAT12 and 1.44 meg in Mac/HFS or the other way around, but I believe there is a 0.04 meg difference in capacity caused by the two filesystems)
(Then there was also a 2.88M formatted floppy that wasn't widely used. I have never seen boxes of those, so I don't know how they would have been labelled. Probably 4 meg unformatted capacity.)

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-27, 23:49:

Then there was also a 2.88M formatted floppy that wasn't widely used. I have never seen boxes of those, so I don't know how they would have been labelled. Probably 4 meg unformatted capacity.

Yep ! 4mb unformatted and have an ED logo where the HD logo on 2mb 3.5" is.....