[Coco] quick question

[Arthur Flexser]

On Fri, 28 Dec 2007, Torsten Dittel wrote:

> I played around with that on the ATARI ST and didn't only change the 
> sector interleave for one track but as well between the tracks (it 
> wasn't necessary to start with the 1st sector right after the index hole 
> so after stepping to the next track you wouldn't have to wait for the 
> index hole passing by). I called this formatting "spiralization". Since 
> the floppy disks were doublesided, another fixed sector # offset between 
> side 0 and 1 made the disks reading even faster under normal TOS 
> operation. However, I never tried to figure out the optimal "fast read" 
> formatting for the CoCo (DECB or OS-9).
> 
> Torsten
> 

It would undoubtedly depend heavily on what step rate the drive was using.  
If you optimized it for the 30 ms step rate that Disk Basic uses, you'd negate
the advantage of patching Disk Basic for a faster rate.  Though I suppose
you could build a step rate parameter into this hypothetical formatting utility
that would adjust the degree of "spiralization" depending on what step rate you
wanted to optimize for.

Art