[Coco] CoCoSDC and 42 track disks.

Richard E Crislip rcrislip at neo.rr.com
Thu Dec 4 23:59:09 EST 2014


On Thu, 4 Dec 2014 10:01:49 -0600
Allen Huffman <alsplace at pobox.com> wrote:

> Disk Extended Color BASIC defaults to 35 tracks (156K?) for disk
> drives. Later floppy drives (sold third party, and then by
> RadioShack) were 40 track (180K) drives, but Disk BASIC was never
> expanded to support it.
> 
> There were patches available to let Disk BASIC use 40 track drives
> (and even 80 track 720K), so most all of my Disk BASIC floppies are
> 40 tracks.
> 
> At some point, I learned that many drives could actually support more
> than 40, and mine worked reliable at 42 tracks, so I very well may
> have a ton of floppies that are formatted to 42 tracks.
> 
> Does CoCoSDC support this?
> 
> Likewise, there were patches to use 80 track drives (360K per side)
> but if I recall, this broke some compatibility with BASIC due to
> needing more memory or something. I had two 80 track 5 1/4" drives at
> one point, but I think I only used them under OS-9. (Wow, think of
> the storage. A 360K boot drive, plus two 720K other drives. I had
> over a megabyte... Wild.)
> 
> 		-- Allen
> 

Thanks for asking that question. I am very much in the same boat. In
fact I quit copying my real disks when I realized all was not being
copied. The copies stopped consistently at 629 regardless of what the
disk was. 8-/.


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