[Coco] [Color Computer] a question to those of you with working cocos with floppy discs

[Steven Hirsch]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009, Joel Ewy wrote:

> I have CoCo and Apple][ floppies from the early to mid '80s that are
> still apparently fine.  Some that look terrible still work like a
> charm.  I have gobs of second-hand CP/M disks.  Most of them work, but
> there is a fair degree of failure there.  Don't know why those seem to
> be in worse shape.  Could be brand issues or just that these particular
> disks were used a lot.

It also could be that they were written on a drive with alignment and/or 
speed on the other end of the envelope from the one you tried years later. 
The Apple 2 GCR encoding seems to be less sensitive to this than dedicated 
FDC chips, probably because it's self-clocking to a large degree.


> Now 1.44M floppies from the early to mid '90s seem to fail me far more
> frequently.

Tell me about it.  The media is terrible and the hardware is terrible. 
I'm working hard to get anything important I own off of 3.5" disks.


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