Date   : Sat, 31 Jul 2010 10:39:09 +0200
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: Why did Acorn ADFS only allow 640KB on a floppy?

On 30/07/2010 23:11, Tom Walker wrote:

> Again, like with DDFS, I've seen the latter done (on a LOT
 > of Atari ST discs), but it was never officially supported
> outside of custom formatters.

If we really want to throw the cat among the pidgeons, we can look at 
the Amiga's "forget the FDC, we'll do it ourselves" approach which 
squeezed something like 880K onto a conventional disc, with special 
custom formatters that pushed it into the 900s - though you did end up 
with situations where a computer could only read its own discs...


Best wishes,

Rick.


PS: One of my old college friends was a hardcore Amiga fan... While I
     never really thought that highly of the machines, some of the
     add-ons were incredible. There was a box that plugged into the side
     with a button that, when pressed, would freeze the machine. You
     could snapshot memory, compare a snapshot with live, modify memory
     or registers... it was the closest I've seen to a full-blown
     emulation 'monitor' running on live hardware.
     Sadly, I think it's main intended purpose was cheating in games by
     allowing memory locations for "lives" and "powerups" to be altered.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...