robby@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Robert Spotts) (08/04/89)
I'm sure this topic has come up before, but I kind of missed the out come of the discussion... If I upgrade my disk drive with the US Doubler this will give me true "double density" which is a 180K floppy...correct? If this is correct, would it possible for a standard(180K) IBM floppy to read my atari disk??? Would it be possible for an IBM to write Atari Dos Format with the right program???? H E L P ! ! ! Rob S.
jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) (08/07/89)
robby@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Robert Spotts) writes: > If I upgrade my disk drive with the US Doubler this will give me true > "double density" which is a 180K floppy...correct? If this is correct, > would it possible for a standard(180K) IBM floppy to read my atari > disk??? Would it be possible for an IBM to write Atari Dos Format > with the right program???? > Not quite, the standard IBM format is 360K which is DS/DD. While it is possible to format IBM disks single sided, I have yet to find a reason to do this other than to format 3.5" disks for Atari ST's with single sided drives. As for having the data being read back and forth between computers. The only thing that I have heard of doing that is an ATR-8000/8500 with the 8088 coprocessor (the reasoning is obvious, you can boot up MS-DOS with it) and a Happy Enhanced drive. There's no other way to my knowledge of doing it and before I went and bought an IBM XT clone I was a devout Atari 8-bit user with a good 130XE system. You'd also have to dig around to find out how Atari disks are formatted, just because the capacities are the same doesn't mean they use a compatable format. You have two different drive controllers that expect tracks and sectors to be laid out differently (most likely). It wouldn't surprise me if Atari deviated from the standard Western Digital and NEC 764 drive controller schemes. /*--------------------------------------------------------------------------* * Flames: /dev/null (on my Minix partition) *--------------------------------------------------------------------------* * ARPA : crash!pnet01!jca@nosc.mil * INET : jca@pnet01.cts.com * UUCP : {nosc ucsd hplabs!hd-sdd}!crash!pnet01!jca *--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/
charles@c3pe.UUCP (Charles Green) (08/07/89)
In article <4094@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> robby@vax1.acs.udel.EDU writes: > [about the USDoubler giving 180k storage capacity, and asks whether > this allows data interchange with the IBM PC] Just another observation that the Happy upgrade now allows 1050 owners to both read and write single-sided PC-DOS diskettes. (The diskettes have to be *formatted* on a real PC clone, because the 1050 can't sense the index hole, but some PC clone disk controllers get upset if the index hole goes flying by at an unexpected area on the disk.) I have it, and it works. My understanding of the US Doubler is that it can do 256-byte sectors, but not the 512-byte sectors used by PC-DOS. -- {decuac.dec.com,cucstud,sundc}!c3pe!charles ex::!echo Boo: