Compaticard (was: Any AMIGA users?

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Tue Jan 1 08:13:59 2002

At 10:11 PM 12/31/2001 +0000, Richard Erlacher wrote:
>> 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.

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
Received on Tue Jan 01 2002 - 08:13:59 GMT

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