[Coco] Re: Disk Basic and 512 byte block floppies.

[Amardeep S Chana]

"John E. Malmberg" <wb8tyw at qsl.net> wrote in message
news:bukito$m4b$1 at sea.gmane.org...
>
> There is a MS-DOS API for doing setting disk parameters including the
> sector size, and it has been documented to work for all versions of
> MS-DOS since 2.x.

> Much of the documentation for that API has been removed from the MSDN
> documentation that I have for my old copy of Visual Studio.  But it is
> still in my even older Symantec C++ kit.

> So yes there is a documented PC BIOS and MS-DOS API to set the sector
> size of floppy disks.

It would be great if you could look in the Symantec docs and post some
details about the call.  If there is such a function I'll gladly eat my
words!  But I'll remain skeptical until I can identify an int/fcn around
which code can be written to validate the capability.

> The API has been tested to work in the DOS Emulators in Windows 95,98,
> and Windows NT 4.0.

Here is another area where I'm skeptical.  I've seen the source code for
Jeff Vavasour's emulator and it uses no API.  It directly accesses the disk
controller I/O ports.  Were you using a different emulator and if so, is
source code available showing disk access via a system call?

Regards,
Amardeep