[Coco] OT: They said it couldn't be done...

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 13 May 2007, Bob Devries wrote:
>Well, history has again proved the scoffers wrong.
>
>For a lot of years now, people have been saying that *it is impossible to
>read Amiga disks on a PC*.
>
>Now, using ADFREAD, it is possible. Painful, but possible. Sometimes disks
>require multiple passes, but hey, it works.
>
>To bring this back to topic, ADFREAD uses the same FDRAWCMD that Darren A's
>CocoDisk utility does.

The problem with reading amiga disks is that you have to read in at least the 
whole track, and then search through the buffer to find the files, there are 
no index pulse triggers, or hard coded sectors on the amiga disk, that's how 
they put 880k on a 720k disk, and some aftermarket disk formats stretched 
that to nearly a megabyte.  Their drivers just opened the gate for long 
enough for a full turn of the disk, which was about 12k of data if the disk 
was an HD disk and the drive was too, otherwise 6k.  The HD only turned 150 
rpm & weren't at all dependable.  Disk writes were also full track at a time, 
with no regard for the index pulse to start and stop the write.

There were aftermarket utils that did allow other "pc" formats to be read 
though.

>--
>Regards, Bob Devries, Dalby, Queensland, Australia
>
>Isaiah 50:4 The sovereign Lord has given me
>the capacity to be his spokesman,
>so that I know how to help the weary.
>
>website: http://www.home.gil.com.au/~bdevasl
>my blog: http://bdevries.invigorated.org/
>
>
>--
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>Coco at maltedmedia.com
>http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco



-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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		-- W.C. Fields