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From: randy@athena.mit.edu (Randall W Winchester)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm
Subject: Re: 1581 disk drive
Summary: 1581 does MFM
Message-ID: <1990Oct2.204205.27429@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 2 Oct 90 20:42:05 GMT
References: <kayZVPy00WBLA2Vkxa@andrew.cmu.edu> <2025@ac.dal.ca> <1990Oct1.222319.23869@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <14378.2707ee38@max.u.washington.edu> <459@news.nd.edu>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Reply-To: randy@mit.edu (Randall W Winchester)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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In article <459@news.nd.edu> treesh@bach.helios.nd.edu writes:
>From what I know, the 1571 has MFM coding for use in CPM mode, but this
>allows it to be able to read and write MS DOS disks with fancy software.
>The 1541 (besides beig single sided) only supports GCR encoding with no way
>to work with MFM disks.  Im not sure if the 1581 supports MFM or not, but   
>it proabaly does.
>
>ctfm

The 1581 supports only MFM.  It uses MFM for all disk formats
including 1581 "native" mode.

It is possible to format 720K MS-DOS disks on the 1581.  SOGWAP
Software, makers of Big Blue Reader, freely distributed a 1581 MS-DOS
format utility as a companion to Big Blue Reader.  I think it's called
MSFORMAT81.ARC.  It might be on QLink.

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*  Randy Winchester  *  randy@mit.edu  *  PO Box 1074, Cambridge, MA  02142  *
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