"Market" for old macs?

[Fred Cisin]

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005, James Fogg wrote:
> Do you have a PC? Apple does (or did) offer the OS's on their website,
> and there were instructions about how to use various PC based programs
> to write them in a Mac 800K format from a PC drive.
> Somewhere I have the images and software because I've had to do this
> once.
> Fred Cisin wrote:
> > I'd LOVE to hear from anybody who is successfully formatting and writing
> > GCR with a PC (without adding in a "flux transition" based additional disk
> > controller (such as Catweasel or COPYII Option Board))
> > It is "impossible".   (VERY difficult)
>
On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Jim Leonard wrote:
> Writing?  Yes.  Reading?  Not if you emulate a floppy controller with your
> parallel port.  Google "disk2fdi" for a working program.

Disk2fdi is, indeed, remarkable.
(BTW, it does NOT appear to "emulate a floppy controller with your
parallel port";  It appears to be sampling the raw data lines of a disk
controlled by a normal FDC, and using the parallel port to provide some
of the functionality of a "flux transition" board)
Producing a version of it that can WRITE will add a few more
serious complications.

But I still don't believe that APPLE ever provided a way for a
PC to format and write 800K GCR.