dorf@iesd.auc.dk (Thomas Dorf Nielsen) (05/17/91)
Can anybody out there please help me out on this one: There is fellow, who knows beans about the amiga. He needs a thorough(?) technical description of the Amiga disk format, in order to be able to write a driver for another computer, making that other computer able to do R/W on Amiga-formatted disks. So, in what book/article/paper can I find such a description? (All about tracks, blocks, sectors, TPI etc.) Please reply by email... Thanks. /Thomas oo . . . __/\_/`'
jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com (Randell Jesup) (05/19/91)
In article <1991May17.160053.13799@iesd.auc.dk> dorf@iesd.auc.dk (Thomas Dorf Nielsen) writes: >He needs a thorough(?) technical description of the Amiga disk format, >in order to be able to write a driver for another computer, making >that other computer able to do R/W on Amiga-formatted disks. Unless his hardware can do full-track raw reads/writes (i.e. no MFM decoding/encoding, raw bits straight to drive including clock bits), then it's hopeless. Most disk controller chips just don't have that sort of function as an option. However, the Amiga can read/write just about any format the drive hardware can handle, since encode/decode is software based (of course non-Amiga formats can be slow to encode/decode). >So, in what book/article/paper can I find such a description? (All >about tracks, blocks, sectors, TPI etc.) There's a (terse) description on pages 992 and 993 of the Amiga Rom Kernel Manual: Libraries and Devices, revised edition. This covers sector layout, not filesystem layout (documented in the Bantam AmigaDos Manual). -- Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering. {uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup@cbmvax.commodore.com BIX: rjesup Disclaimer: Nothing I say is anything other than my personal opinion. Thus spake the Master Ninjei: "To program a million-line operating system is easy, to change a man's temperament is more difficult." (From "The Zen of Programming") ;-)