[comp.sys.amiga] floppies and ansi info

tlm@pur-phy (Timothy Lee Meisenheimer) (01/20/88)

[munch a bunch of fr.....]

Two questions or those in the know.

1) Why do the floppies for the amiga have 880K formatted capacities
when so many others have 720K ? How about the 1.4M floppy drives (say
by fujitsu) - can we install them and get 1.4M storage.

2) Where can I find the complete listing of ansi commands supported
by the con: device? The Amigados manual only seems to have a subset
- trying to work on a better termcap for uw don't ya know.

Thanks.

tim.

dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) (01/21/88)

>1) Why do the floppies for the amiga have 880K formatted capacities
>when so many others have 720K ? How about the 1.4M floppy drives (say
>by fujitsu) - can we install them and get 1.4M storage.

	Conventional controllers have the ability to read and write single
sectors at a time.  This requires a certain amount of space be left between
sectors.  As the Amiga reads and writes entire tracks at a time, there is
no need for these spaces and thus one can put more sectors on each track.

	I don't have the specs on the 1.4M floppies.  If they simply double
the number of tracks you can probably do it.  If they instead double the
bandwidth you can't do it with the built in floppy controller.

>2) Where can I find the complete listing of ansi commands supported
>by the con: device? The Amigados manual only seems to have a subset
>- trying to work on a better termcap for uw don't ya know.

	You could try the RKM manual.  If you have access to a SUN 
termcap (which is ANSI), you could use that... 

					-Matt

cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) (01/22/88)

In article <973@pur-phy> (Timothy Lee Meisenheimer) writes:
> Two questions or those in the know.
> 1) Why do the floppies for the amiga have 880K formatted capacities
> when so many others have 720K ? How about the 1.4M floppy drives (say
> by fujitsu) - can we install them and get 1.4M storage.

Because the Amiga squeezes sectors side by side on each track and get 11
512 byte sectors per track as opposed to 9 512K sectors ala MS-DOS. No
1.44 M drives will NOT work on an Amiga, they require a different Data
clock rate.

>2) Where can I find the complete listing of ansi commands supported
>by the con: device? The Amigados manual only seems to have a subset
>- trying to work on a better termcap for uw don't ya know.

The Rom Kernel Manual (White Vol 1, A-W Vol Devices,...) Look under 
console.device. They are described completely. Note that the console
device may not be a full ANSI 3.64 implementation.


--Chuck McManis
uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis   BIX: cmcmanis  ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com
These opinions are my own and no one elses, but you knew that didn't you.