Philip Pemberton wrote:
Chuck Guzis wrote:
On a diskette produced on a
write-the-entire-track formatter, such as
a Formaster duplicator, everything returned by a Read Track looks
great, as there are no write splices. However, a floppy produced with
a disk copy program, each sector is written individually, with
accompanying write splices, so even if you manage to create a format
with HGC in the right place (hint: format 128-byte sectors with
different length codes in their headers), it stands a good chance of
not working.
Interesting way to do copy-protection... Yet another format that can't
be (easily) created without a track-writer. Or an Amiga.
Do you have any kind of estimate for when this will be finished (to the point
of being releasable - sounds like there might be ongoing firmware patches?).
I'd be interested in buying one I think (even though I try to avoid USB if I can).
In my experience, the current generation of PCs
can't handle FM at all.
My 386 (with ISA floppy controller) is scarcely any better.
I've got three IBM ones from some IBM desktop or other (I got them as boards,
so unfortunately have no idea which system they came from) which are extremely
good - they'd read and write FM happily, and would cope with 128-byte sectors
sizes too. The only downside to them is that they sometimes throw up CMOS
errors and refuse to boot, which makes my plans to turn one into a headless
remotely-driven system a bit problematic.
My experience has been that it's "reasonably"* easy to get hold of a PC
that'll read FM (at least at 256bps and above) - but difficult to get one
that'll also write.
* i.e. source a pile of 'em and there'll probably be a good one in there
somewhere.
The last time I wanted an image of a BBC Micro floppy,
I ended up
streaming it across the RS423 port at 9600bps. Ugh. Not fun.
I've done exactly that with a 20MB ST506 drive before and a modified copy of
xfer - that on a drive with failing bearings. Something like 7 hours of
high-pitched bearing scream later... the drive held together though, thankfully.
cheers
Jules