#Blitter and the Floppy
9 messages in this thread
Changing trackdisk would also free up the blitter for other (graphics)
operations. Harry M.
Interesting…. I didn't realize that the blitter had anything to do with
the disk drives.
-Jim
MOS via Autopilot & Amiga
Huh? The blitter has absolutely nothing to do with the disk drives…
Jim,
Humm…I don't have my tech manuals…but my memory seems to recall
that the blitter was used to lay out the track in MFM format in memory and then
dump it to the drive (and vice versa).
Or something like that.
Don
Don,
I just checked the RKM… you're right, the blitter is used to
format out an entire track & dump it to the drive.
-Jim
MOS via Autopilot & Amiga
Gotcha Jim D! -Harry M-
Not quite Harry… remember, I got into the Amiga market via the disk copying
market. I am quite aware of how the floppys work. 🙂
The blitter really does nothing with the floppy drives, but in some
circumstances it used to encode/decode the MFM data used by the floppy drive.
The blitter does not connect directly to the floppy drive in any way.
The blitter is used by the OS (only for 68020 and lower processors) to encode
and decode the MFM data that is DMA'd via PAULA. I guess I missed the front of
the thread. 🙂
On 68030+ systems, the processor is used to encode/decode the data because the
blitter is much slower.
That's Paula's domain isn't it? That may be one of the reasons the Amiga's
stayed with 8-bit sound. The Paula chip is fairly intergral to the machine in
that it controls many things besides sound and therefore it would take a lot of
engineering effort to replace it.
The next chipset hopefully will incorporate 16-bit sound. Whatever type of
graphics it uses. Personally, i'd like to see a modular Amiga with ReTargetable
Everything:)