reading old apple ii diskettes

Hi,

I have a bunch of old 5.25 " diskettes from my Apple II+ in high school. I've been trying to figure out how to see if the data on them is still good. If I get a IIgs from ebay, will it read the disks and write them to a format my macs can read? I do have a mac with an old 3" floppy disk drive. I would like to make disk images from the Apple II+ diskettes, move them to a modern mac, and run them in an emulator like Virtual II.

Also what about the IIgs itself, will it run AppleII+ programs ?

If I get the gs on ebay, are the disk drives separate?

There isn't a service anywhere that will do this is there?

Thanks
Bob

Hiya Bobito,

if you do acquire a IIGS, there will still be a fair amount of setup involved to then get the disk images over to a Mac.

You can make disk images with Copy II+ and Asimov and save the images to a 3.5" floppy disk. The easiest way of then getting to more modern Macs is using an older Mac - one with a 3.5" floppy drive. Hopefully, you can network this Mac to another more modern Mac by ethernet.

Alternatively, you could try this service:

http://www.retrofloppy.com/

They've been around for a while, but I've never needed to use them myself.

- Alex