[Coco] Re: Disk Basic and 512 byte block floppies.

[John Collyer]

No, it will not!  Win XP can read 35/40 track floppies just
fine, but they are 512-Byte sectors.  Also it not just the fact
that the size of the sectors are different, there are other
differences too.  Look at the Color Computer Disk manual
Page 116.  The skip factor is different and you have to set
up the FDC in XP to access coco type diskettes.  There
are other factors involved too, but these are the main
differences.  In Win XP you cannot change the way the
FDC works unless you write a device driver.  Not only
that, you must get a ok from Microsoft that your driver
works correctly and then they will issue you a way to
change the XP drivers.  If you don't get Microsoft's ok
you cannot change the driver.  This is why I suggested
that you look at the July 1986 issue of the Rainbow for
Marty Goodman's CoCo to MS-DOS utility.  It already
will write a single sided floppy correctly for MS-DOS and
this will be able to be read from Win XP.

John Collyer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <x0remery at dsbmail.itg.ti.com>
To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2004 9:16 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] Re: Disk Basic and 512 byte block floppies.


>
> >>>> I formatted a 720K 3.5 inch floppy with 512 byte sectors
>
> Is this basically what is done when you patch RSDOS to use 80 tracks of a
floppy?
> That does allow the full 720K access, one half at a time. I have a program
(by
> Colin Stearman) that patches RSDOS and most or all related commands to do
this.
>
> The limitation is the number of drives you can have files open on at the
same
> time,
> unless you tell the program to relocate Basic's GAT table.
>
> I've been thinking of writing a utility to easily transfer files from
35/40 track
> floppies to 72 or 80 track floppies. If I made an 80 track RSDOS floppy,
> does that mean WinXP could read it?
>
> Bob
>
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