Subject: Re: Floppy driver
To: Mike Schwartz <mykes@shell.portal.com>
From: None <rhealey@aggregate.com>
List: amiga-dev
Date: 02/28/1994 10:41:35
> Handling MS-DOS disks doesn't mean the filesystem.  The IBM PCs have a Western
> Digital floppy controller chip that writes sectors to floppy disk differently
> than the amiga OS does.  Fortunately, the Amiga hardware is capable of
> reading and writing data compatible with the Western Digital controller,
> but it's a
> radically different program to do so.  In other words, take that amigaOS
> compatible floppy driver sources and you can only use the motor on/off and
> head stepping code.  The entire rest of the driver needs brand new and
> custom code to read the WD controller format.
> 
	The AMIX floppy driver used tables of some sort and the same
	low level routines to write Amiga vs IBM format, both low and
	high, 1.44M, density. That might be an angle to look at...
	It also used a user mode process to do stuff that looks alot like what
	trackdisk does and had a weird ioctl interface that only that user
	mode daemon used. It appears the user mode daemon was used for
	writes only.

		-Rob

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