wDrive

What is wDrive?

It is a 5.25” floppy drive emulator for apple disk ii. In the past, most of the commercial diskettes were protected. They are difficult to duplicate. Although many of them were cracked and their images can be used by floppy disk emulators now a day, protected diskettes still exist and many of them were imaged. We can found many protected diskette images in woz, edd and nib format.

The main aim of develop this device is to support protected disk images.

Background

Start from support nib which is the most easy format to implement in the emulator. Of course, this format only preserve little characteristic of diskette, even the sync bytes were lost. Only light copy protected image can use by the emulator. To step forward, we developed edf format which is converted from edd and inherited features of edd format.  Use this format, many protect schemes can be supported by this emulator. Until woz was introduced, it preserve more diskette’s characteristics than edd ( not sure if it preserve all diskette’s characteristics), we are very close to the target.