On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> > > 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.
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.
> > > 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.
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_at_xenosoft.com
XenoSoft http://www.xenosoft.com
Received on Sun Jul 07 2002 - 15:37:28 BST