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From: raymond@cs.vu.nl (Raymond Michiels)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Amiga Minix Questions (Floppy drives)
Keywords: floppy 68000 compatibility
Message-ID: <7660@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 19 Sep 90 11:28:54 GMT
References: <1990Sep17.115240.16619@warwick.ac.uk> <7583@star.cs.vu.nl> <1453@targon.UUCP> <1990Sep19.074613.27826@warwick.ac.uk>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
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phupp@warwick.ac.uk (S Millington) writes:

>In article <1453@targon.UUCP> gert@targon.UUCP (Gert Kanis) writes:
>>In article <7583@star.cs.vu.nl> raymond@cs.vu.nl (that's me) writes:
>>>
>>>This was not a typo. We have sacrificed 160K to be compatible with
>>>PCs, Atari's and Macs.
>>
>>Disks are and are not the same between the PC's and the 68000's .
>>They are essentially the same physical format  i.e. 80 tracks of 9 sectors.
>>But unfortunely the way things are written is different  i.e. byte ordering.

>   So what you are saying is that although the amiga 880K capacity has been
>sacrificed down to 720K to maintain compatibility they are NOT compatible
>in any real sense of the word.

But they are! Gert was (probably) talking about the difference between
the PC and ST version. The Amiga, Atari and Mac versions are binary
compatible: you can edit and compile a program on a Mac, take out the
floppy, mount it on an Amiga and run it! If that isn't compatible, then
what is?  The only thing is not (yet) compatible is the PC and 68000
file systems, but since they all use the same physical format you can
easily exchange data between them by using tar(1) or something similar.
If we would have use the original Amiga format this would not have been
possible.

	-Raymond.