floppy expander

[Fabie]

there's a program which I have seen in AMmga computing issue 84 march 1995
it's named "Floppy expander" and the price listed in the magazine is 10$

it says this:

Floppy expander allows you to fit about 1.5mb on a standard floppy and an amazing 3mb when used in conjunction with the XL drive 1.76mb
This is achieved by compressing data 30-70% of its original size,which all of this happens automatically

btw, it is not on Tosec

1.5mb on a standard floppy ?

anyone have this program?

[Zetr0]

oooooo this rings a bell..... I think I had something called "double space" back in the day...it was great for text based stuff but compressed graphics and sound files it wasn't all that good on - I think it was RLE (run length encoded) compression...

It also worked on the floppy drive too.... I think it was configured using mount-list entries.... oh this is going back some years here....

I used to use it on my C Programming / Dev partition - many many moons ago...

probably wasn't the same package... but it kinda does the same thing...

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

oooooo this rings a bell..... I think I had something called "double space" back in the day

For the Amiga?
I know MS DOS for the PC (6????) had a compression system called "doublespace." It was later named DriveSpace, but the original name was DoubleSpace.

desiv
(I remember it would bite me sometimes when I used a boot disk that didn't have the doublespace driver on a system with a doublespaced drive.)

[cpiac64]

i remember floppy win95 are formatted 1,76mega

[Mad-Matt]

For the AT A1200 release which came with HD drives, I remember it being possible with a special driver to format a HD disk to 1.44mb (not 1.76mb as no ability to slow drive). Dont rememberer it being relighable enough to store important data though.

[andy2004]

sounds like EPU or what was the other one stackker
epu used the xpk librarys, to compress the files, came with 3 of its own,
of course you can get 1.4mb of data onto a 880kb using powerpacker/stonecracker/crunchmania for apps, powerpacker for data, using ppmore / ppshow etc to view them, with average compression of upto 65% for apps and 70-80% for powerpacker data files, noticably text files.
or maybe slightly more with lzx but then you have unarchive them before using.

[Fabie]

mmm...it seems that floppy expander is another amiga proggy lost

[zipper]

There are some similar proggies on Aminet and a review about DiskExpander.

[cosmicfrog]

fairly sure it is as andy says just a bit of custom but basically xpk on a floppy

[prowler]

Originally Posted by Fabie

there's a program which I have seen in AMmga computing issue 84 march 1995
it's named "Floppy expander" and the price listed in the magazine is 10$

it says this:

Floppy expander allows you to fit about 1.5mb on a standard floppy and an amazing 3mb when used in conjunction with the XL drive 1.76mb
This is achieved by compressing data 30-70% of its original size,which all of this happens automatically

btw, it is not on Tosec

1.5mb on a standard floppy ?

anyone have this program?

I realize that Fabie is banned but, since it seems from other posts in this thread that very little is known about this software, I will reply anyway.

I recently won the disk and manual for this program from airey36 on eBay. The comments in the Amiga Computing Issue 854 review are quoted directly from the manual.

The software was issued by Power Computing, probably for bundling with some versions of their Amiga external floppy drives, notably the High Density XL Drive.

It appears to be based on Schatztruhe's Disk Expander software, a copy of which I have too. The program uses a number of external libraries for compression purposes, in particular those adhering to the XPK standard.

Both the Floppy Expander and Disk Expander floppy disks are copy protected, but StingRay's recent release of PowerCopy Pro 3.07a cracked means that it may now be possible to copy them.

If this is successful, then I'll upload them to The Zone and scan the manuals too.