Date   : Fri, 17 Sep 1999 12:23:48 +0100
From   : hick@... (gARetH baBB)
Subject: Re: The full emulator

In message <11.199909161555.QAA18035@...>,
          stuart@... (Stuart William McConnachie) wrote:

> but the illegal characters are different between DFS and DOS.  In short
> attempting to represent DFS disks (which is the native format for BBC
> disks, and hence supported by pcBBC) in a consistent and coherent way
> within DOS is virtually impossible.

RISC OS apps have been using specific DOS<->ADFS character mappings for a
while now. It's a standard practice, not exactly new.

> The floppy disk controllers built into most modern PC's are designed to
> read 1.44Mb disks.  This is the standard modern PC format for floppy
> disks.  BBC's, as you may recall, used 400K and 640K formats (DFS and
> ADFS 80T DS respectively).  It is therefore the PC that can not read the
> disks, not pcBBC or your floppy disk drive.

Ahem, 640K is double density - you show me a PC which can't use double
density discs, and I'll show you a busted PC which can't cope with DOS 720K
discs either.

It's true that very few modern PC FDCs will cope with single density though.

> system under the next release of Windows then?  Wouldn't it be great if
> files under Windows had proper assignable attributes and types rather

If you relied on VFAT file name capabilities, it would be easy to represent
BBC files.