Re: 1541 question (was Re: Catweasel)

From: Nicolas Welte (welte_at_chemie.uni-konstanz.de)
Date: 2002-07-11 15:04:48

Hársfalvi Levente wrote:
> I seem to remember some book mentioning that it's actually possible to
> read whole halftracks, even if there's also some information on the
> adjacent halftracks. There were some rumours about a physically narrower
> read head in the 1541s.

That's probably true. If you look at the r/w head, it has a pattern like a
fork with two prongs: the inner part is the r/w coil, and the outer parts
(the prongs) are the erase coils, they erase parts of the two adjacent
halftracks as well.

I think I once tried to read MFM disks formatted with 80 tracks on the
1570/1571 and it worked quite well. At least I could read the directory
without problems. Since the MFM burst commands are pretty useless for 80
track disks, I would've had to write my own head positioning code for the
drive.

Nicolas

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