8 Jul
2009
8 Jul
'09
1:44 p.m.
On 8 Jul 2009 at 12:49, Fred Cisin wrote:
Several authors of such programs would use the
competing products to
generate sample disks to analyze. I had a couple of disks from a
"Goupil". But the guy's handwriting was such that I thought that he
had written "Groupil". It was most of a year before I corrected the
spelling. Hmmm. A couple of programs support "Groupil"; where did
they get the disk from? The guy that sent them to me SAID that he
hadn't sent any to anybody else. There was also somebody who made an
I.N.W. disk based on my L.N.W. In addition, there are a very small
number of formats that I put in specifically for the developers of the
machines, some of which never made it to commercial market! Not a
DELIBERATE Mountweazel, but, . .
I hear you. That's why, for example, 22Disk has *two* 400K formats
for the Kaypro 2X. One with head IDs of 0/0 and the other with 0/1.
Both legitimate Kaypro system disks as far as I can tell.
There's little rhyme or reason here. The Future FX-20 uses head ID 0
for the first side and 4 for the second side. The Sharp MZ80B has
head IDs of 0 and 1, but starts the data on the "top" side of the
floppy, rather than the bottom side.
That's not by any means the extent of the whackiness (some would say
originality) in diskette formats that has come through here. We
offered a *special* 22Disk that employs not the static table of the
shareware version, but one that uses a table of procedure calls to
perform the necessary mapping for those really odd formats (e.g.
different head IDs on the same side with sector numbers that aren't
the same from track to track).
You wondered if any of those programmers had a life outside of the
workplace...
--Chuck