Re: upgrading CBM-3040?

On 17/11/2017 21:52, Mia Magnusson wrote:

> Were there any obvious reason for not doing this on the later drives?

IMO it's a combination of time, money & backward compatibility.

There were early drives that couldn't reliably use 40 track disks, so 
they would be spending time and money making a drive that would harm 
their compatibility image and only give a small amount of extra space in 
return.

> Also it's kind of strange that Commodore AFAIK never used 40 instead of
> 35 tracks on any of their 35/40 track drives, except for MFM disks on
> 1571.
>
> At least the double sided 1571 format should have used all 40 tracks,
> perhaps with MFM encoding.

Dolphin dos and speed dos supported 40 tracks by splitting the BAM, 
http://unusedino.de/ec64/technical/formats/d64.html.

I thought the 1571 was limited to reading and writing tracks in MFM mode 
and the DOS was limited to GCR. Sure it would be nice if you could 
insert a PC compatible disk in the drive and load a PRG from it, but 
along with 40 track GCR disks, I can see why it wasn't done.

It appears that Commodore projects were often one man doing the work 
with a load of managers sitting over him asking why it's not finished yet.



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