Subj : Re: floppy disks
To   : boraxman
From : StormTrooper
Date : Tue Apr 29 2025 02:48 am

 bo> What was interesting about floppies was they could be formatted to
 bo> different capacities.  There was this DOS program called 2M that was
 bo> pretty cool that let you format disks to greater capacities, by putting
 bo> more sectors per tracks, and more tracks.  You could get over 800K on a
 bo> 5 1/4" DS/DD diskette, and up to 1.8M on the 1.44 M disks.

The Apple II world had something similar.  DOS 3.3 nominally wrote 35 tracks per disk side.  Even straight out of the factory you could generally get at least an extra 2 tracks onto the disk.  In some cases as many as 4.  Only trouble was it wasn't reliable across the board.  If you only wrote 1 or 2 extra tracks you'd be reasonably sure anyone could use it, but you'd come across drives that could only do 35 and then it'd be useless. Above that was even worse, basically just tailored to your own personal setup. You also had to patch DOS to do it, no biggy it was just a poke once it was loaded, but std DOS couldn't see the extra tracks even though they'd be referenced in the directory.

ST

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