Really Atari ST?

Post by prox » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #13

colejohnson66 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who didn’t grow up with many floppy disks, how was one able to format a floppy to have a different capacity? I know there’s different “formats” such as DOS, C64, etc, but I don’t understand why ? I have heard about how formatting a floppy involved placing the tracks and how modern hard drives have “hard sectors”, but for some reason, it’s not “computing.”

The floppy drive has a stepper motor that controls the placement of the read/write head above the disk. In the ST era, the control of that motor was directly under the control of the operating system. For an 80 track disk, the movement required to step between tracks was a certain known amount. If you formatted the disk with the tracks spaced closer together, by altering the stepper movement during that process, you…

Post by b112 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

thorianus wrote: post #20

Sodaware wrote: post #17

There are so many things the ST does badly - weak sound chip, screen memory laid out like a Venetian blind (to quote Jeff Minter I think), and a mouse that was designed in a universe where ergonomics did not exist. But I still love it. Without the ST I wouldn't have discovered programming and all the highs (and lows) that it brings. Looking back now, I'm surprised people were able to get as much out of it as they did…

Well, I'd argue about the music. The chiptune music from SID and YM has aged very well, while Amiga sounds horrbile without FM synth and 8-bit 11kHz samples. Also memory was much better organized than Amiga - without the speed penalty. And the simplicity of Shifter (the "GPU") allowed for really awsome 'beyond the dream' hacks, which were unavaliable on Amiga due to much more capable - but limited in 'hacking' video…

Post by bentcorner » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #23

Zenst wrote: post #2

I vaguely recall that people used to get their atari floppies and format in a MSDOS machine as it would yield a slightly bigger capacity - something to do with default format on DOS using more tracks. That was until alternative floppy formatting tools came about on the Atari scene and there was one that was also great for copying discs - going to bug me to recall it's name, but was one of those utils that had a cult…

I remember seeing a tool that could be used to punch a hole in floppy disks in order to double the capacity. I didn't have such a tool, but I did have a cheap soldering iron. I ended up with a bunch of 3.5" floppy disks with holes melted through them. Thinking back on it now, I'm surprised that I didn't damage the disk with the heat of the iron. Then again, maybe I did and didn't notice because I was 12.

Post by tus88 » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

pwdisswordfish4 wrote: post #30

I love how every comment here is about the Atari ST instead of what the post is about, which is where the 069H byte check actually came from.

Post by icedchai » Tue, Sep 22, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #38

> (ST refers to Sixteen/Thirty-two, referring to the 68k CPU’s external and internal data width) I thought ST referred to Sam Tramiel - Jack Tramiel's son.