Month: October 2021

Finally, after a year of waiting, Applesauce units are available once again! The year has proven to be extremely difficult to acquire the parts needed to produce Applesauce. I have been slowly gathering what I needed over the last 7 months or so, but between the worldwide chip shortage and overall chaos due to COVID-19 this has proven to be a challenge. And to add to the complexity, huge price increases and import tariffs have made it much more costly to produce. But, with everything finally in hand I am finally able to get some new units out into the world. There aren’t a lot of them, but hopefully enough to satisfy the current demand.

For this production run there is a completely new set of PCBs that bring with them the ability to use 34-pin PC floppy drives in addition to the Apple II and Mac drives that were supported in earlier revisions of the hardware. This makes Applesauce compatible with a wider range of floppy drives than any other disk imaging solution. For owners of previous revisions, upgrade kits are available. But note that if you don’t need to use PC drives, then there is no real benefit to upgrading. Your current hardware will continue to be supported 100% and will receive all major new features.

There are also new sync sensors available for Shugart-based Disk II drives and the UniDisk 5.25 (A9M0104 and A9M0107).

Each unit takes about 45 minutes to assemble, test, and pack so it isn’t a fast process to fulfill orders. I will be shipping orders out every day, but depending on the order backlog it may take several days to a week to get your order shipped, so please be patient. There is also a pretty lengthy wait list, and wait list orders will be given priority over other orders.

I have been working hard on adding more content and information to the website, so feel free to look around. I’ll be continuing to add more between processing orders.

For those of you hearing about Applesauce for the first time, you can read about what makes Applesauce special on the What is Applesauce? page.

Thanks to all of you for your support of the Applesauce project!

This is a huge new release mainly focused at support for the revision 2 Applesauce hardware, but with lots of new stuff for owners of current hardware. The new hardware adds support for working with drives using the standard 34-pin interface (most PC drives). The A2R format used by Applesauce has also been updated to version 3.0 in this release. Lots of new features in the updated format like support for hard sectored disks. But please note that the new A2R 3.0 files are not readable by older client versions.

Floppy Drive Profiles and Configuration

PC floppy drives can have a wide range of features and different jumper settings. Applesauce helps you get your drives ready for duty by probing the drive to determine its capabilities and help ensure that its settings are correct. And then it will remember all of this information by managing drive profiles for you.

Disk Imaging

Since I needed to be touching the fast and flux imagers, I decided to completely modernize the code for both. And of course this ended up being an almost complete rewrite of both imagers.

• Full support for hard sectored disks when using PC drives.
• Added support for fast and flux imaging of Amiga DD and HD disks.

Disk Analyzer

• Now outputs fewer log messages for things like custom nibble translate tables.
• Lots of new menu commands for manipulating and navigating disk images.
• Support for Amiga disks as well as file system browsing of AmigaDOS disks (both OFS and FFS).

Disk Image Formats

• Added support for loading SCP files. Some tools don’t properly fill out the disk type value in the SCP header, so some images may need to be tweaked in a hex editor before being able to load.
• Added read/write support for Amiga ADF files.
• Added support for TI-99/4 V9T9 disk images.
• Support for IMG files of 1680K (Microsoft DMF) PC disks.

Miscellaneous Fixes and Improvements

• There is a new Sync Sensor Installation Assistant screen available under the Drive menu. This will allow you to test sync sensor functionality and can be a huge help when installing sensors.
• If for some reason your floppy drive isn’t detected by Applesauce, there is a new Override Drive Type command under the Drive menu. But, be careful with this command as it bypasses some Applesauce safety protocols!
• Improved heuristics for Forth Blocks detection and formatting.
• Drive Diagnostics now shows milliamp current loads on +12v and +15v rails separately.
• Improvements to FM decoding of streams with many glitches in them.