The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VI.. Stop In!!!

[Running Bear]

Well I managed to get a couple hours of sleep today so I opened up an Apple A9M0107 5¼" floppy disk drive that needs some attention. The 19-pin cable that was connected to it was chewed up by a dog and isn't serviceable nor do I have a spare. So I was wondering if I could put a 20-pin flat ribbon cable in it's place and run the drive off an X104 controller like a Disk II drive. I never tried this before. I removed the damaged cable and studied the on-board connector. It has twenty pins, same as the Disk II connector and the electronics of the X104 and 0101 control cards is virtually identical so i couldn't see any reason why it shouldn't work. Nothing ventured nothing gained. At the most it could blow the computers mother board, at the least blow the control card or the control board in the drive. Any of these I can obtain and replace easily. So I connected the twenty pin ribbon cable to the drives control board and connected the other end to an X104 control card in my //e and turned it on. It worked! The drive booted the disk and the greeting program came up on the screen. That's great. The drawback of running it off an X104 controller is that I can't daisy chain a second drive from this one. But I can still run them as a set on the X104 controller if I convert the second drive too. So I guess one of my next online purchases will be a couple of long flat 20-pin ribbon cables from Bulgaria.