PLI Turbo Floppy 1.44 for the Macintosh - SCSI Floppy

[eric]

I recently (well not so recently now) picked up a PLI (Peripheral Lands, Inc) Trubo Floppy 1.44 for the Macintosh. Made a low offer and it was accepted on the bay.

This is an interesting device as unlike other SCSI floppy devices - like the IOmega Floptical - it requires no driver to work on the and can boot from 1.44mb floppies. That means you can use it on a Plus or SE or other non-Superdrive Macintosh computers.

Booting From a System 7 Disk on my PowerBook 170 (just what I had setup on my test bench at the time):

Identifies as a DISK type - (ID5) - which is a bit odd - thought it would be a removable:

It uses a run of the mill PC Floppy drive so no 800k support (though 720k should work, haven't tested yet)

But where this gets really interesting is in the way it works - there are 2 ROMs chips on the floppy to scsi adapter board (which I've dumped) that contain a SCSI Driver and Apple Partition headers - well one does - the other one is 99% blank besides a PLI vendor string. This means if we can extract and craft the Partition in such a way we could inject it into a disk - a BlueSCSI could boot a 1.44 Macintosh Floppy image!

While that is cool - there really isn't a TON of benefit here besides academic - you could just as easily create a 1.44mb HFS HDD image and get the same results.

What I need your help in is to find some sort of copy protected 1.44 disk image that would only work from a "real" floppy/floppy drive to test if there's any benefit to perusing this further!

Note I'm only talking about 1.44 disks now - but once we get the drive/driver working in emulation we could likely adjust the size for 800k disks.

The last interesting part here is there seems to be copy protection on the ROMs themselves - after they load the Floppy driver into memory it blanks out all the driver/partition data - so when you try to do a raw read of the SCSI device where the disk driver and partition would be - it's just a bunch of `0xF6`

Interesting? Yes! Any real practical use? Who knows. But that's not why we're here - we're here to tinker

Lastly I'd really like to find the manual as well - I haven't been able to determine the correct way to swap disks.

 

[PL212]

This is interesting because it’s very similar to the 2.88mb “PLI SuperFloppy” which they made for the NeXT. Also SCSI, in the same kind of case, but in black and with a design that matched NeXT peripherals. The use case was for NeXT Cubes, after the introduction of the NeXTStations which had floppy disks. A bunch of software started to ship on floppys, which would have left Cube owners out in the cold without this product. There’s a thread on it over here.

A few notes on the SuperFloppy:

1) It works with 1.44 and 2.88 (Extended Density) disks, as actual NextStation floppy drives did.

2) The drive inside appears to be a Sony model which — just like 2.88 drives in the NeXTStation and some IBM PS/2’s — combined data and power into one cable. Interestingly PLI included an unused floppy power cable on the board — I wonder if this part was shared with the 1.44-based TurboFloppy?

3) I vaguely remember the SuperFloppy being marketed as Mac-compatible. Will check the docs, which I also have.

Would the ROMs from a SuperFloppy be helpful to you?

 

[PL212]

A few more notes:

1) There are two different products from PLI called "SuperFloppy":

- A platinum SCSI device, with presumably a standard 1.44 drive capable of reading both MFM (1.44M) and GCR (400k and 800k) disks.

- A black SCSI device, with a Sony 2.88 drive using a combined data and power cable - very similar if not identical to a Sony IBM part. This drive cannot read 800k or 400k disks as they would be GCR.

2) The PLI "TurboFloppy" is also a platinum SCSI device, with support for only MFM disks: 1.44M Mac and PC, and 720k PC.

Note that in the below ad, "SuperFloppy" is a misnomer for Apple's "SuperDrive", also known as FDHD, that PLI is both competing with and offering compatibility with for pre-FDHD machines. It has nothing to do with the later PLI SuperFloppy.

PLI eventually started using the term "SuperFloppy" for one of their own products, of course:

The Mac SuperFloppy was a good deal more expensive than the TurboFloppy due to the more advanced drive (versus the commodity MFM device):

OK, back to the black NeXT "SuperFloppy". The drive inside mine is a Sony MP-F40W-1Y (spindle label) and/or MFD-40W-1X (side label). A front LED header is unpopulated, as is the space for a regular power connector at the back. (Some IBM PS/2 2.88M drives did have an activity light).

Here is a shot of the SCSI bridge board:

I'm happy to try and dump the ROM if someone can recommend the right equipment.

 

[eric]

I'm happy to try and dump the ROM if someone can recommend the right equipment.

I dumped mine with a ti866+, just got a no name one on Ali express with a bunch of adapters for not too much money - would be interesting to compare with the Turbo Floppy.

Thanks for all the additional info!

 

[PL212]

OK so it turns out the Black NeXT SuperFloppy does work on the Mac

 

[lilliputian]

Just purchased (very reasonably!) a beige PLI Turbo Floppy 1.4, excited to try it out! I just uploaded Turbo Floppy 1.4 Utilities to the Garden (which I'd gotten not too long ago), and there is in fact no driver to be found on the disk.

 

[JDW]

What I need your help in is to find some sort of copy protected 1.44 disk image that would only work from a "real" floppy/floppy drive to test if there's any benefit to perusing this further!

Eric, in the 2+ years since your opening post, I take it no one has come forward with a copy-protected 1.44MB floppy?

May be hard because I think floppy copy protection was all the rage in the 400K and 800K era, but by the time of 1.44MB drives, software buyers were sick and tired of copy protection and many software companies even start advertising how their disks weren't protected. So I too am curious how many copy protected Mac edition 1.44MB disks there are out there.

 

[lilliputian]

Potential candidates, if any, would be from EA, Microsoft, and Adobe, off the top of my head. But yeah, copy protection on floppies by that point was pretty much done by then. I have no personal recollection of any, but of course there still could have been some outlier.

 

[lilliputian]

@eric Just got mine in. Before I do any testing, can you confirm the power settings you're using? Mine says 7.5VDC, but doesn't specify polarity or Amps (and of course didn't come with a power brick). I'm assuming center-positive and 1 Amp or so should be fine?

 

[lilliputian]

PS, some photos for people to enjoy!

 

[lilliputian]

A few more:

 

[eric]

@eric Just got mine in. Before I do any testing, can you confirm the power settings you're using? Mine says 7.5VDC, but doesn't specify polarity or Amps (and of course didn't come with a power brick). I'm assuming center-positive and 1 Amp or so should be fine?

I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon cst and will look