CP/M BIOS setup

Format selection assistance is not new. Howard Fulmer of Morrow was attempting to add that in to the multiple format capability of the Morrow machines. XenoCopy-PC has/had an undocumented capability: in the format selection menu, it could be asked to look at the alien disk. It would then "gray-out" physically different formats. Specifically, it would look at number of sides, bytes per sector, and sectors per track. It remained undocumented because it was OFTEN unacceptably wrong. There were a surprisingly large number of diskettes that were FORMATTED both sides but only used one side, or had more formatted sectors than were used! (8 sectors per track, but 9 sectors per track formatted!) There are a number of other parameters that are not feasable (although not necessarily impossible) to automatically sense, including side-PATTERN, skew/interleave, number of reserved tracks, records per block, etc. There were also a few problems with unreasonable expectations - there were a few customers who expected the format selection assistance to render possible formats that were otherwise physically impossible for the PC hardware to do. There were even some folk who were ADAMENT that Apple ][ diskettes could be read by the PC, since they were the same diameter and turned at 300RPM, and that therefore we were part of some sort of CONSPIRACY to prevent the conversion. -- Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com PO Box 1236 (510) 558-9366 Berkeley, CA 94701-1236