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

[Amardeep S Chana]

"Gene Heskett" <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote
in message news:200401200322.48914.gene.heskett at verizon.net...
> On Tuesday 20 January 2004 00:15, Roger Taylor wrote:
> >At 11:47 PM 1/19/2004 -0500, you wrote:
> >>That said, there is one function that was removed from Windows XP:
> >> a 720K double density diskette cannot be formatted.  Existing
> >> disks are recognized for read/write.  But they removed the option
> >> to format them both from the GUI and the command line.
> >
> >Which, in my very humble opinion, was an evil act.  Instead of
> > killing a person, he's breaking both of his legs and watching him
> > crawl around.  But you know, Gates has always slipped things in
> > very slowly under most people's radar of vision.  It might be 3
> > more years before he removes the ability to write to the 720k DD
> > disk, but might allow you to read them for another 6.

Well, someone will always dislike any change.  This was probably done to
reduce the number of options seen by the end user.  There is also no longer
support for formatting 5.25", single sided, or 8 sector diskettes.  The only
option appears to be the selection of 1.44 which would presumably be useful
if the drive was a 2.88.

> >Don't worry, it's nothing I'm concerned about, but it's still
> > humorous to watch the richest man on the planet have this kind of
> > control.  All I can say is, upgrade.   Ok, bad choice of words.  :)

I seriously doubt he even knows.

> Well, as the box said, needs windows 98 or better, so I installed
> linux.
> :-)

No argument here!

> The funnier part is that when I found out that the superio chipset on
> this mobo was capable of any format you could dream up, apparently
> even including the original apples 128 byte sectors, or even 1024
> byte sectors if you needed it, it was a piece of cake to add the 256
> byte sector formats to the linux floppy drivers abilities.

No, not the Apple format.  They never had 128 bytes sectors.  They were
always 256 bytes and in Group Code Recording format.  13 or 16 per track
depending on DOS version.  Floppy disk controllers can't make heads nor
tails of that bit stream... it's as different from FM and MFM as anything
could possibly get.  There is a 6502 routine that encodes and decodes data
buffers to and from a raw sector pattern.  It is then written/read at
precise software-timed intervals one byte at a time to a parallel/serial
circuit that actually twiddles or reads the head signal.  Cheap but
effective (and SLOW).

Amardeep