[Coco] (no subject)

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 22 April 2021 09:01:46 Jim Gibbons wrote:

> Floppy drives question.
>
> I got a couple of floppy drives that are 5 1/4" 1.2mb and a 3.5" 2.88
> floppy.  Does anyone know of software that allow the COCO 3 to access
> these floppy drives?
>
> Thanks
>
> Jim Gibbons

IIRC, both of those drives need a controller with 4x the data rate of a 
stock coco controller, or 1 megabit/second data rates. The coco 
controller, OOTB, can only do 250 kilobits a second.  There are patches 
and chip switch instructions for some of the aftermarket, and the 
original coco controller that can raise that to 500 kilobits/second. But 
I not had the fortune to own one of those. So the 1.2 meg drives I've 
had, had to be happy, and were, for both sizes, at 720k per disk. 
However, HD marked disks are too hard magnetically and will NOT be 
recorded hard enough to be read even 10 minutes later, for good results 
you must use the magnetically softer DD rated disks with these drives.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
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