Commodore 64 Tidying Up Clutter Sorting Tools Vic-20 Chips 1541 Disks Endless It Is - Episode 3149

Описание: Time to reset the bench...again...and try to re-find all the bits, bytes, and pieces of things...endless it is...

Time to format more disks and then randomly check one of them with the modified performance test program that does all the tests, moves the head back and forth more, and fills the disk all except for 1 block, yes, 663 blocks are written to and thus the disk is just about full...really tests the drive...and yes, it does take longer...but so be it!



I am formatting disks...and using the normal commands and the 1541, it is slow...about 90 seconds a disk...but inside of the RETROREWIND.CA 4 in 1 cartridge, there is a disk drive utility program section and you can do the same operation in...well, I did not time it, but I think it is perhaps 10 seconds...I really should snag a stop watch...in other words, it is much more time efficient! And the cartridge also has 3 other modes to check out what is going on with your Commodore 64!



I am going through a bunch of disks...and I found that some are just not wanting to format or do anything, and indeed, I have found that they are HARD SECTOR disks. The disks we use have one timing hole hidden away under the sleeve, while these disks have I think I read 17 holes...I think it was...I should double check that...These disks will not work in any commodore drive that I know of as we used soft sectored disks...so, if you have any of these, I guess they are good for display, perhaps good if you need to take a disk apart to get another sleeve, or if you can find somebody that has a computer that uses these relics, pass them along!

Hard-sectored floppy disks have one index hole and a hole for each sector. For example, a 5.25-inch hard-sectored disk with 10 sectors would have 11 holes, and a 5.25-inch disk with 16 sectors would have 17 holes. 8-inch hard-sectored diskettes would have 33 holes for 32 sectors. The index hole marks the beginning of each track, and the sector holes indicate where each data sector starts.