FDCs (was: MITS 2SIO serial chip?

From: Fred Cisin <cisin_at_xenosoft.com>
Date: Mon Dec 17 20:21:48 2001

Yes, you can. Correction. I, and others, can. I shouldn't claim that
you can.

But Int13 won't. That is NOT the same as the chip not being able.

You need to assemble an array of the sector headers that you want.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred        cisin_at_xenosoft.com
On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> There's one advantage that you can exploit with the WD parts that the NEC parts
> won't support, and that's formatting with interleaving.  The NEC parts seem to
> be unable to format a diskette with other than strict ordinal sector numbering,
> while the WD allows you to number them with any offset you like.  The result is
> that an interleaved format optimized for one set of system parameters can still
> be read by another system without the other system having to be adjusted in any
> way.  Of course it won't be able to read an entire track in one revolution, but
> it will have the ability to read the diskette without introducing a modified
> lookup table for sector numbers.  I know that doesn't make much difference
> nowadays, but back when folks used floppies as their main/only storage medium,
> it impacted performance.
> 
> Dick

Received on Mon Dec 17 2001 - 20:21:48 GMT