Can the Apple II connect to 3.5″ drives or flopticals for other platforms?
For 400K or 800K Mac 3.5″ drives, in general, no. Apple’s 3.5″ drive that was sold with Apple IIGSs has logic to sense which machine it is hooked up to (Apple II or Macintosh) and it works accordingly. Most 3rd party drives don’t bother to put in Apple II support in their drives. Some may work if you hook them up to a UDC instead of an Apple 3.5″ inch card. Old style Mac 800k drives are very slow. Mac 1.44MB (High Density) 3.5″ drives can be used if you have both both the High Density 3.5″ drive and the new Apple 3.5″ superdrive controller card. If you don’t have both, you will only be able to do regular density (800K). Of course, you will also need High Density Disks. ProDOS 8 programs not only recognize the 1.44MB disks, but most programs format and recognize HD disks just fine. You can even boot off of a HD disk, allowing plenty of room for GS/OS Desk Accessories and such. There are a few drawbacks: you cannot boot copy-protected software or some FTA demos. Also, you can’t daisy-cha
