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Vlasak Computer Systems 'Megastor' dual 8 inches floppy drive

inakito

inakito

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 5, 2011
Messages
297
Location
Spain
Hi.
I got this floppy drive -dual floppy drive 8 inches- but I did not get the controller card, apparently made by Sorrento Associates.
Has anyone had the chance to work with one of these?

In case anyone is interested in getting this unit (with interface cable but without controller) I have it available for free!.
It is *very* heavy (about 30Kgs),and would ship from Spain, so shipping costs will not be cheap.

I will keep it just for some days, so hurry up if you are insterested!
 
You sure you posted in the right area? I would try the "Items for sale or trade" area.

Also you sure this is for Apple II? I never knew of any 8" drives for Apple II.
 
RWallmow said:
You sure you posted in the right area? I would try the "Items for sale or trade" area.

Also you sure this is for Apple II? I never knew of any 8" drives for Apple II.
Click to expand...


Yes, it was connected to an Apple II when I purchased it. However I did not get the controller. The owner had two Apple II units and sold them separately. So the controller went away!.
It has a label in front "Compatible with Apple II".
 
RWallmow said:
Also you sure this is for Apple II? I never knew of any 8" drives for Apple II.
Click to expand...

Hi RWallmow,
Yes, there were some 8" floppy controllers for the Apple II. I have the Vista A800 controller and it works very well! At a time when a DOS 3.3 diskette held 140k, a DSDD 8" floppy on the A800 controller held 1.2mb so a 2 8" drive system could have a lot of programs mounted at your fingertips. The controller came with a utility/patch disk for DOS 3.3, and patch disks for CP/M and UCSD Pascal. Under CP/M it could also read & write the standard 128k SSSD CP/M interchange format to share programs with other CP/M systems. I fired up mine after being dormant for over 15 years last month, and it still works fine on my old Apple II Plus and my newly acquired Apple IIe.
Regards,
Jeff
 
jgalinat said:
I fired up mine after being dormant for over 15 years last month, and it still works fine on my old Apple II Plus and my newly acquired Apple IIe.
Click to expand...

WOW!

I would love to see that equipment. I had no idea that any 8 inch drives existed for the Apple II. Could you post some pictures?

Thanks!
smp
 
smp said:
WOW!

I would love to see that equipment. I had no idea that any 8 inch drives existed for the Apple II. Could you post some pictures?

Thanks!
smp
Click to expand...

Agreed! Never figured anyone bothered to make/convert any 8" drives for Apple ][ since Apple had their 5.25" disk ][ drives so early on in their history and comparatively inexpensively for a "micro" floppy of its day. But I guess for CP/M cross platform stuff it makes some sense why someone would make/market one.
 
smp said:
WOW!

I would love to see that equipment. I had no idea that any 8 inch drives existed for the Apple II. Could you post some pictures?

Thanks!
smp
Click to expand...

Hi SMP & RWallmow,
Sure I will post some pictures later today and may try a brief video with my point & shoot still camera (Sorry, I don't have a video camera). For me it wasn't the CP/M compatibility that lured me to the 8" drives but the amount of storage. One DSDD 8" diskette holds 8.5 times what a 140k Disk II floppy does. I could put almost all my favorite games on one disk & using a popular menu program of the time called "FCC Menu" I could launch any program with 1 or 2 keystrokes. As a side note, when the IBM PC came out with its 160K and 360k floppies, I got a Maynard 8" ISA bus controller and used the same drives under MS-DOS on my IBM PC/XT as the hard drive was only 10mb. The High Density 1.2mb & 1.44mb drives made the 8" floppies obsolete in a pretty short time though. Let me dig out the camera out & I should have some pics by evening.
Regards,
Jeff
 
Here are the pics of the controller & drives. The controller was purchased separately from the drives. I show the drive enclosure with the cover off because I figured the drives are more interesting than a plain beige cover. The left drive is a Siemans FDD=200 and the right drive is a Shugart SA-851R. It initially had 2 Siemans drives but the second drive started failing BTW, The Shugart drive has been acting up also and a cleaning disk didn't fix it so I may soon be looking for yet another full size DSDD 8" floppy drive to replace it. I also show the controller installed in an Apple IIe and a boot screen from an 8" utilities disk. It is a modified DOS 3.3 and it can still access the Disk II drives like normal DOS.
Regards,
Jeff
boot.jpgopen drives.jpgVista A800.jpgapple IIe.jpg
 
Jeff,
how many pins does it have your interface cable ?
My drives have a 50-pin flat cable connector. Same cable shared by both drives.
 
inakito said:
Jeff,
how many pins does it have your interface cable ?
My drives have a 50-pin flat cable connector. Same cable shared by both drives.
Click to expand...

Hi inakito,
Yes, 50 pins is the standard for most 8" drive interfaces. The drives are connected in parallel by a common ribbon cable and the drives are selected by drive select lines set by either jumpers or switches. You can have up to 4 drives in the chain. Your drives look very nice, I could probably use them but unfortunately the shipping from Spain to New Jersey in the USA will be much more than they are worth. As you noted, these are pretty heavy. Even the bare drives are pretty heavy and the shipping would probably be quite a bit.
Regards,
Jeff
 
I wanted to take some pictures of the inside but have been unable to open the enclosure! Impressive built! Attached is a picture of the back of the unit.

DRIVE_8_3.jpg
 
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