1 Jan
2002
1 Jan
'02
12:13 a.m.
At 10:11 PM 12/31/2001 +0000, Richard Erlacher wrote:
The Amiga did the MFM decoding using software and its
custom chip - the blitter, I believe, which could perform
somewhat complex logical operations. They no doubt did this
to save on hardware, like Woz's disk controller.
- John
The Amiga IS
MFM! But it does not have WD style sector headers.
It reads and writes a track at a time, and parses it in software. There
are no gaps, synchronization issues between sectors, etc.
That's almost enough to make one wonder why they used MFM. Had they used
RLL, which requires no complicated, or even simple modulator, they'd have
had half-again the capacity.