My two cent about it, hope it can help somebody.
I recently bought 5x 1581 replica boards from PCBway - shared project ("Commodore 1581 Enhanced", something like this).
I've built two drive using what I have in my toolbox: 8520 and 1772 and the official ROM v.2 (and a 3D printed replica case).
Then, since I still had 3 boards lying around, I decided to build one more using the ROM modded by floobydust. Unfortunately for some reason (maybe my fault or maybe something to do with the replica board, I can't say) I had no success. So I went back to the original v.2 ROM.
---> However I discovered the original V.2 ROM works fine with both 8520 and 6526-R4 (can't say about previous releases of 6526), and with WD1770 and WD1772. I didn't expected it works with the 6526...
I've seen no difference between WD1770 and WD1772 (the WD1770 doesn't make more noise). I'm using the same floppy disk model in my tests: I have an "8520/WD1772" version and a "6526/WD1770"one, mapped respectively as #8 and #9 and I'm copying from the SD2IEC mapped #11 I put inside my C=64 (well, actually a Sixty-Clone modded with 6502 CPU, PLA on EPROM, ROMs on EPROMs and NanoSID... as modded as an 50+ years old actress
.
cheers,
Giovi
-- forgot to mention: I'm using the floppy drive adapter (
https://gitlab.com/toms01/1581-pc-drive-adapter) and brand new, not modified floppy disk drives 1.44 MB, DS1 ("B: drive") set. You only need to cover the 1.44M/720k hole on the floppy disk with some tape (the 1581 is expecting 720 kB floppy disks and can't handle the 1.44 MB.