Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!phigate!philica!adrie
From: adrie@philica.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Amiga Minix Questions (Floppy drives)
Keywords: floppy 68000 compatibility
Message-ID: <669@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 19 Sep 90 14:30:14 GMT
References: <1990Sep17.115240.16619@warwick.ac.uk> <7583@star.cs.vu.nl> <1453@targon.UUCP>
Reply-To: adrie@beitel.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 16

In article <1453@targon.UUCP> gert@targon.UUCP (Gert Kanis) writes:
>During the porting of Minix to the Amiga and the Mac care was taken to
>not to create yet another variant. So at the moment we live with PC disks
>and M68000 disks  so to speak.   (Does the Sparc have floppies ?).

Yes, it does and its high-density drive can also read/write normal density
(720KB) diskettes. But Minix doesn't consistently use int's or short int's
to describe the zone and inode bit-maps. Because in 32-bit mode int's are
not the same as short int's, this presented problems. I decided to use
int's, but I later discovered that this made the 68000 and Sparc diskettes
incompatible. I just left it that way. You can read an 68000 diskette on
the SparcStation, and reversely read a Sparc diskette on an Atari, but
DON'T try to write on it!

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Innovation Centre Aachen