7 Jul
2002
7 Jul
'02
3:37 p.m.
On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote:
The popular (sloppy terminology) name for those is "720K disk" While the
unformatted capacity is a better way to differentiate diskettes, the
popular name is what you'll probably need to know when trying to buy some.
IFF somebody were to go to the effort of some relatively trivial software,
then they could be done with a Central Point Option Board (or Catweasel),
or even with almost any computer that uses a Western Digita 179x disk
controller chip (such as Coco or Kaypro). Those have a raw track
read/write cpability, as opposed to the multi-sector read/write supported
by the 765.
--
Fred Cisin cisin(a)xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
> Will a
1541 or 1571 external floppy be a good addition? Which?
There _was_ a box to adapt
the 1541 to the parallel port, but just for
reading C-64 disks. Natively, you need a 23-pin external floppy, either
the A1010 or a third-party drive. In any case, it's a "1MB" (raw) floppy,
giving you 880KB on the Amiga. And get real low-density media - don't
just tape over the hole on a high-density disk. > ISTR
that there's no reasonable hope of genning up a boot floppy on a
> PC or Mac, right?
Exactly so. The Amiga reads and writes an entire track at
a time, giving
11 sectors of 512 bytes by skimping on the inter-sector gap. In case
you didn't know, the graphics chips are used to transform the MFM data
from the diskette to binary data buffers. There is no one dedicated floppy
chip as in a PeeCee.