31 May
2000
31 May
'00
9:29 a.m.
On 31 May 2000, Eric Smith 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.
Interesting. I never came across any of those. It probably also had the
added advantage of allowing for very quick reads.
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.
Where they screwed up, though, was in sticking to a
single byte of XOR
checksum over the entire "sector". The checksum scheme Apple used was
arguably inadequate for 256-byte sectors; it was truly horrible for
>5.5 Kbyte sectors.
Truly.
Sellam International Man of Intrigue and Danger
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