🚀 go-pugleaf

miket@exucom.com (Michael Teper) writes:
: 
: I need Pascal or ASM (or both) code that would allow me read data off of a
: disk (PC environment) without any concern for the data or data format or
: structure on the disk.
: 
: To make this simpler - I need to read some data put on a disk by an Apple
: non-standard program. My intentions are to read whatever it stored on
: Apple disks using the PC and then hopefully make some sence out of it
: knowing the contents of the data.
: 

While you can do direct disk I/O on an IBM, you can't read an Apple disk
directly; the hardware won't let you.  In simple terms, the Apple II disk
drive wrote a "signature" field on the start of each sector, that
particular byte doesn't occur on the disk except at the start of a sector,
and bytes are encoded down to fit into a special sequence, something
similar to the way UUENCODE changes two bytes into three by carrying bits
over.