CompuServe Messages

Rather than brain-damaging those drives, they should write a software driver that will access them under PC-DOS, as either 360K drives (double sided, 40 tracks, double-stepping the head), or as 720K drives (2s, 80 tracks, single-stepping the head). Such drivers are commercially available from Tall Tree Systems, JDrive I believe, but it's questionable whether they'd work under the Transformer. I know: they should call up Tall Tree and ask them for an evaluation copy, promising to report back whether they work or not (which should make it worthwhile for TT). (If they write the driver, it should follow the PC-DOS tradition of recognizing the disk type by reading the disk, and adjusting, so that you can insert either a 360K or a 720K disk in the drive and have it work automatically. (And it should also support older PC-DOS formats of 160K, 180K and 320K — lots of software is still distributed in those formats)). As to AmigaDOS on 5.25" drives, you need quad density (80 track) drives to work with the current AmigaDOS TrackDisk.Device driver. There's absolutely no reason that AmigaDOS couldn't also support regular 40 track drives, but a new TrackDisk.Device would have to be written. (It's pretty ironic. The changes in the driver would probably amount to 5 lines of difference — but until it's done, you can't use 40 track drives with AmigaDOS). – Bela