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From: jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: US Doubler
Message-ID: <157@crash.cts.com>
Date: 6 Aug 89 18:36:04 GMT
Sender: root@crash.cts.com
Organization: People-Net [pnet01], El Cajon CA
Lines: 30

robby@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Robert Spotts) writes:
>   If I upgrade my disk drive with the US Doubler this will give me true
>   "double density" which is a 180K floppy...correct?  If this is correct,
>   would it possible for a standard(180K) IBM floppy to read my atari
>   disk??? Would it be possible for an IBM to write Atari Dos Format   
>   with the right program????
>
 
Not quite, the standard IBM format is 360K which is DS/DD.  While it is
possible to format IBM disks single sided, I have yet to find a reason to do
this other than to format 3.5" disks for Atari ST's with single sided drives.
As for having the data being read back and forth between computers.  The only
thing that I have heard of doing that is an ATR-8000/8500 with the 8088
coprocessor (the reasoning is obvious, you can boot up MS-DOS with it) and a
Happy Enhanced drive.  There's no other way to my knowledge of doing it and
before I went and bought an IBM XT clone I was a devout Atari 8-bit user with
a good 130XE system.  You'd also have to dig around to find out how Atari
disks are formatted, just because the capacities are the same doesn't mean
they use a compatable format.  You have two different drive controllers that
expect tracks and sectors to be laid out differently (most likely).  It
wouldn't surprise me if Atari deviated from the standard Western Digital and
NEC 764 drive controller schemes.

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