Floppy/ADF limitations

[Retro1234]

In theory if the phsical size of a floppy disk allowed could you conect a 10" disk drive to the Amiga? instead of 80 tracks 200 tracks?

and then could you have a huge 10mb ADF for use on something like HxC?

[Retro1234]

obviously a stupid question I guess the floppy controler couldnt handle it

[Toni Wilen]

Number of tracks can be increased, there is no hardware limits (except floppy drive itself), >80 tracks should work fine with modified floppy emulators. You only need to patch ROM trackdisk.device

Of course it won't work with trackloading programs.

[Retro1234]

Thank you for your reply - could be interesting way of adding hard drive to A500 with floppy emulator :-)

[Retro1234]

So I take it trackdisk.device after a few tests will not go beyond 79 tracks but maybe diskspare.device what about AROS. 68K Trackdisk.device?

[Toni Wilen]

All disk drivers are restricted to track 79 (or maybe 81 max) to prevent possible drive damage.

You also need to adjust floppy geometry (increase geometry structure's cylinders value). Note that floppies (or images) formatted with different geometry are not compatible (becomes "not a dos disk").

For example original floppy disk (80 cylinders) won't anymore work if trackdisk.device is modified for 200 cylinders.

I think best option would be to define new drive ID (Normally only used to detect between DD and HD floppies if drive is HD drive, this changes geometry sectors value 11<>22) that includes (encoded) number of cylinders and create custom trackdisk.device that understands new drive ID type(s).

m68k aros trackdisk.device or hackdisk.device (in aminet) probably is best starting point.

(I am still not sure if this is worth the trouble...)

[Retro1234]

Thank you for your advice -
I guess if theres no intrest its not worth the troube on your part
i'd still be intrested in altering trackdisk.device even if this breaks compatiblity
ID for ED Extra Disk

For me im curious on the subject - With diskspare.device seems unlimted tracks but got a seek error when tracks ran out.
Monkey Islands on Singe adf/file

Can Aros modules be mixed with AmigaOS - Can I loadmodule and use an Aros .device.... in AmigaOS.

[Retro1234]

Did anyone ever create large ADFs for Gotek/HxC?

[idrougge]

It's a bit pointless creating custom ADFs since you can use the direct access option of HxC/FlashFloppy instead — it's the same one used by the selector disk to list contents of the USB memory.

[Retro1234]

Originally Posted by idrougge

It's a bit pointless creating custom ADFs since you can use the direct access option of HxC/FlashFloppy instead — it's the same one used by the selector disk to list contents of the USB memory.

Cool - you can use it as a HardDrive?

[Sinphaltimus]

I think Retro1234 was looking at a way to turn a GotTek into an internal HDD by using a really big ADF file. Which means installing software to it and such. Possibly installing full Wb to it and booting from it. I think it would be super slow (as fast as the floppy bus) but for someone without an HDD in their Amiga, it could be a poor man's solution and i think something interesting if such a capability were to be developed.

But that leaves so many questions unanswered, like, to install WB, you'd need at least a DF1: So could you possibly change DF0 ID without mucking up DF1 capabilities and such?

I dunno, I think it's an interesting question.

For example, on the TI-99/4a, in emulation and soon to be a new hardware device, you can use something called FIAD which allows a directory of any size to be used as a floppy drive instead of dsk files. Not unlike using folders as hard drives in WinUAE except those folders get assigned as floppy drives. You can see this done in emulation using classic99 and in the real world using TiPi which is not out yet but in beta, I have one becaus I'm on the beta testing team.

TiPi plugs into the side port expansion of a TI-99/4a (with sideport 32k) and interfaces with a raspberry pi for the shared folders used as floppy disks. It just saves files directly to the folders without regard for sectors and tracks. And yes, as Toni points out about the Amiga, "Of course it won't work with trackloading programs." holds true on the TI as well.

Perhaps not something for the GoTek but a completely new kind of floppy emulator developed for such functionality. Although Toni makes it sound possible, so yes, interesting indeed.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Cool - you can use it as a HardDrive?

Yes, all you need is the correct software. I think the Atari ST already has it.