CompuServe Messages

Mathew, I'll try to respond to some of your complaints and may add some facts to support Commodore's actions, although I'll be the first to admit that there are some "gray areas". However, there are some mitigating factors of which you may not be aware that make some of the issues you raise a little less black-and-white. First, concerning the HD floppy issue — you have to understand that the "standard" HD floppy drives used in both Macs and Klones will NOT work on the Amiga, due to the initial design of the Amiga floppy drive interface going back to the A1000, and which continues today through and including the A4000. While the Macs and Klones use standard "off the shelf" controllers to talk to their floppies, the Amiga floppy drives are controlled by the "overworked" custom chipset. The Amiga chipset does not provide the bandwidth needed to read the data off of standard HD drives fast enough. Because of this, Commodore has had to have some CUSTOM floppy drives designed and built to support the HD format – these drives basically spin at half the speed of the "standard" HD floppies, so the Amiga floppy driver can keep up with the data rate coming off of the disk. Since these drives are single-sourced (as far as I know), Commodore is at the mercy of the supplier – if they can't get them fast enough to meet production demands (for the 4000's), they surely won't have any available to sell through Parts. There have also been some problems discovered with the HD drives and AmigaDOS 2.04 that have been fixed in later versions, which leads to your number 2 complaint. If 2.1 isn't yet available in the consumer channels, then it really doesn't do any good in making the HD floppies available, except on 3.0 machines (the 4000). As to why 2.1 isn't readily available, I really have no idea. The only thing that I can "guess" is that Commodore, having limited resources, is spending all of their "production effort" getting 600's, 1200's, and <continued>