12 Sep
2012
12 Sep
'12
2:39 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 10:00 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
On 9/11/12 6:50 PM, Mouse wrote:
Cool! Thanks! I have one of these but haven't ever tried to hook it
up to anything.
Does ftp.bitsavers.org just not support anonymous
FTP, or is something
broken?
there is no anonymous ftp on bitsavers
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/teac/FC-1/ if you dig around, a bunch of folks have figured out
the mode select
commmands to set the format. I did a quick search but couldn't find
the teac document that describes the actual SCSI commands supported.
From what you've posted, I see that it supports
three modes - described
(in *raw* capacity terms) as 1MB (on DD media), 1.6MB, and
2.0MB (on
HD media). It seems that the drive supports FM or MFM-formatted
sectors at 256 bytes per sector, 512, and 1024, with as many sectors
as appropriate per track (so a "normal" PC DD floppy would be 9
sectors of 512 bytes per track - called "720K" commonly).
Besides the "obvious" application of reading/writing an ordinary "DOS
Floppy" (FAT12 filesystem, "720K" or "1.44MB" capacities), and
the
uncommon higher-density floppy format, what sorts of disks from
what sort of systems would be useful to read or write with this drive?
CBM 8-bit-systems disks commonly use 256 bytes per sector, but
they aren't FM or MFM, they are GCR. Are there any CP/M systems
that used 3.5" media that this could read or write disks for?
I don't tend to use floppies on a daily basis, but I'm always
interested in ways to archive old disks or create new disks from
image files to use with old equipment.
-ethan