Amiga floppies size

[LoadWB]

"your MOM."  :snort:

[danbeaver]

Was it diskspare also that enabled HD floppies to be formatted to 1.9MB? Or am I getting my devices mixed up?

I remember using this to achieve 1.1MB capacity on my A1200 IIRC:
http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/HiDensity

At least I think it was that. Oh, also, is it 'floppy's' or 'floppies' anyone?

GCR encoding differs from MFM and was used on the PET/C64 floppy drives.  There are advantages of MFM over GCR, but you can google that if interested.

[danbeaver]

The Aminet reference for the HiDensity.lha is a bit odd; when I read the file's "readme" it takes into account that the early AT A1200's shipped with a HD floppy drive that could take some advantage of a HD floppy by using, what I assume from the device name, is a GCR format to give a boost on a 2 MB unformatted floppy a storage capacity of 1.1 MB.

Not exactly a plot for a Soap Opera on prime time TV, but a side note into more obscurity...

[itix]

The diskspare.device was acceptance replacement when I tried it on my Amiga in mid 90s however it was unstable on certain cheap and old disks. Since diskspare.device had to be loaded before it could be used it was usable only on HD systems. But when you have HD why use floppies?

IIRC when I only had 30MB harddisk on my A600 I used diskspare.device to store some lesser utilities to floppies. I was always short on disks so I wanted to cram more stuff.

[gertsy]

How could one not prefer a full head step over a half head step.

[danbeaver]

How could one not prefer a full head step over a half head step.

Double your capacity, Double your error rate, or was that Double Mint Gum?

[itix]

How could one not prefer a full head step over a half head step.

When yo uhave HD you have no generally need for floppies anymore. If you dont have HD you are screwed anyway because you cant boot from sparedisk.device formatted floppy.

It was interesting experiment but higher capacity CD-R/RW were becoming mandatory in mid and late 90s.

[danbeaver]

Perhaps because it was "ironical"

[paul1981]

The diskspare.device was acceptance replacement when I tried it on my Amiga in mid 90s however it was unstable on certain cheap and old disks. Since diskspare.device had to be loaded before it could be used it was usable only on HD systems. But when you have HD why use floppies?

IIRC when I only had 30MB harddisk on my A600 I used diskspare.device to store some lesser utilities to floppies. I was always short on disks so I wanted to cram more stuff.

The UK magazine Amiga User International distributed coverdisks formatted with diskspare.device, I think they did this from about '95. So you had to use diskspare if you ever wanted to read their coverdisks. They were crammed full of compressed goodies though, all 984KB's worth. I miss that magazine.

[SACC-guy]

Okay, I get the floppies could be setup (formatted) from 837k to 984K...

But what is the "normal" formatted number?

TIA

[Brian]

You got 2 "normal" sizes available on the Amiga, on earlier KS1.x systems it's Original Files System with 837K and for later KS2.x systems it's Fast File System with 880K (if nothing else is specified I'll always go with DOS\3 FFS-INTL).

[paul1981]

Okay, I get the floppies could be setup (formatted) from 837k to 984K...

But what is the "normal" formatted number?

TIA

You can't boot a FFS floppy (880KB) from a 1.3 Kickstart, but you can use FFS floppy's from Workbench 1.3 with Fast File System installed (Workbench 1.3.2 or above has the FFS included).

You can boot a FFS disk from any 2.0 Kickstart or above Amiga. And of course, all Kickstarts can boot OFS (Original File System) disks (837KB).

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong anyone, as I haven't used 1.3 for a number of years.