--- Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com> wrote:
> On Feb 4, 11:43, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>
> > The standard 5.25" drives _do_ use GCR for all native formats...
>
> I didn't know that. Did Commodore machines use a standard controller to
> write the MFM, or did they use the same techniques as for the GCR?
WD177x, AFAIK, in the 1570 (single-sided) and 1571 (double-sided) 5.25" disks
and the 1581 (3.5") drive.
> I know Amigas can read/write DOS disks, but they don't have any sort of
> standard controller.
Right. They can do MFM, GCR or whatever because the diskette interface
is distributed amongst several custom chips including a 4096-bit shift
register in the sound chip. The Amiga reads and writes an entire track
at once and parses it in memory. The MFM stuff is efficient because it
uses the masking logic of the graphic chip to convert MFM to binary and
back. With a simple adapter, you can attach Macintosh drives to the
Amiga and read/write _those_ as well (800K with a Mac drive, and 1.44Mb if
your Amiga has a C= half-speed floppy drive). There is a read-only demo
version of the Mac driver available, read-write is commercial software.
There's even a floppy-based network for the Amiga, but it's around $100
per node. I was just at the web page for it this week. RG-58 cable, bus
topology, and you can still have three floppy drives on the computer as well.
It's great for those bitty-boxes that have no slots.
-ethan
=====
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Received on Fri Feb 04 2000 - 16:01:32 GMT