31 May
2000
31 May
'00
10:48 a.m.
I wrote:
On some later Infocom titles for the Apple ][ family,
they went to two
disk sides, and in order to maximize the amount of data on the second
size (and hence minimize flipping), they went to *one* sector per track.
This does away with the "wasted space" of intersector gaps.
Sellam wrote:
Interesting. I never came across any of those. It
probably also had the
added advantage of allowing for very quick reads.
They did denibblize it on-the-fly, which normal RWTS did not. In that
sense, since they sustained the equivalent of 1:1 interleave, it was
pretty good. However, there was no reason why the same performance (but
not density) couldn't be achieved with standard sectors. The Apple ///
SOS disk driver pioneered this, and IIRC Prodos did it as well.
Do you know of any specific titles that used such
formatting? I probably
have a few of the originals and I'd like to check it out.
I'm not 100% certain, but it would be on later titles that used versions
5 and 6 of the Infocom virtual machine to support large game images.
So it was probably used on Beyond Zork, among others.