[Coco] 80 track disk access under RSDOS

[Bob]

I've just been doing this recently with the 3P. Since it only has one floppy
drive I want to get the most use out of each disk (I hate swapping disks).

I was surprised to find that after a disk has been formatted to 360K, the first
program(s) you save on it (presumably up to 156K worth?) can still be loaded by
an un-patched CoCo expecting only 35 tracks. I always knew that 35 and 40 track
disks were basically interchangeable, but for some reason expected an 80 track
format to be unreadable.

So is all the extra data simply interleaved among the existing tracks or what?
I was thinking it was actually more densely stored, but this obviously can't be
the case.

BTW, 720K on a single RSDOS floppy can hold a whole-damn bunch of games (or
music or whatever)! The first thing I save to the disk is a program named
"#.BAS" which pokes in the 6ms step-rate, 80 track access and some other
patches. Then, when I power up the CoCo, simply RUN"#   from the 360K disk.

cheers,
Bob

   only slightly confused, but happy! :-)



	
		
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