Can a 1581 drive be made to read Amiga floppies?

[commodorejohn]

Both Amiga and 1581 disks are MFM-encoded as opposed to the 1541's GCR encoding, so it might be within the realm of possibility, actually. It's certainly not going to be supported by the drive firmware, but luckily the CBM 8-bitter drives have enough onboard RAM to allow for significant reprogrammability. There's already utilities that finagle it into reading and writing PC floppies, so I don't see why it couldn't be tweaked to support Amiga disks.

[commodorejohn]

It can't support Amiga disks for the same reason a PC floppy controller can't support Amiga disks. The Amiga reads or writes a whole track at a time. There's no gaps between sectors like there are on a PC floppy (or a 1581 one). That's why you can fit 880k on an Amiga floppy and only 720k on a PC one. You cannot write a whole track of data to a disk with the controller in the 1581, even with the Write Track command, even if you had enough RAM.

Ah, gotcha. Interesting...