Date   : Sat, 17 Apr 2010 17:03:49 +0100
From   : mike@... (Mike Tomlinson)
Subject: Re-using floppies

In article <d8834d21003241420h4e72d077tfa07bba9ba5a3f0b@...>,
Alex Taylor <zeem.uk@...> writes

>You're not thinking of Amiga disks are you? I recall reading something
>about being able to read 800K Amiga disks in a standard PC by using
>two floppy drives and some software trickery.

I thought it was simpler than that: the Amiga formatted tracks 81 and
82, and you had to use drives that would allow the heads to be stepped
that far.  Thus if you used a PC drive capable of reaching 81 and 82 you
could read Amiga disks.

There used to be an 8-bit ISA card for the PC which claimed to be able
to copy any floppy disk, even protected ones.   I can't remember what it
was called and Google hasn't helped.  Anyone?  It was, I think mentioned
in one of the BBC FAQs discussing copying disks - it went into some
detail about the clock speed for the uPD765 disk controller chip and how
some 8-bit floppy controllers had two crystals, one for single density
and another for double density.  

It _might_ have been called CopyIIPC. <fx: googles>

That's it.  It was produced by Central Point Software and it was called
CopyIIPC.  CopyIIPC copied protected disks without the need for the
hardware, but if it failed, the hardware card (called the CopyIIPC
Option Board) worked with software called TransCopy.

More here: http://retro.icequake.net/dob/

Who remembers AnaDisk and FDC?  I used those to read BBC disks before
the likes of OmniFlop came along.

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