I used 2M in my MS-DOS hobby programming days, with 8088 and 286 machines. The variable quality of floppy disks made the sizes above 1.76MB a bit risky for long term reliable storage, but at that size and with ARJ compression you could pretty much halve the number of disks you had to buy and store. With a 40MB HDD you did need to do a fair amount of floppy disk data shuffling. 2M was one of quite a range of handy (or sometimes not so handy) utilities I assessed for the local PC User Group. Another neat trick for recouping otherwise "wasted space" were utilities that aided mapping blocks of high memory (such as onboard Hercules video memory on one system I had) into the system memory area, to obtain more than 640KB of MS-DOS system memory. That made life easier if you wanted to have larger runtime and linking libraries in memory.
@@herauthon I did transition to LHA later, but not in conjunction with 2M. By then larger HDD capacity and the acquisition of a Creative 2x speed CD writer made floppies less useful, and the hassle of unique formats less appealing. SFX wasn't a capability I valued just for archiving, so I'm not sure if ARJ could do it.
with 2MGUI you can even reach 2MB (2097152 bytes) of free space on the disk after format it, enable the 84 format track (Ciriaco say almost all of the floppy disk drivers can reach that sector and most of then reach track 84) and trimming the data than one track can handle with clusters of 4 KB (NOTE: on that disk the sectors are divided on 2 tracks) /T=84 /C=128 /F=1 and some more options /G=20 is the default value but you can even reduce it, the same with /X=55 a lower value made the disk faster but if you reduce it too much the disk is much more slower (is a sweet spot), the same happen with /Y=90 ... try "2MGUI d: /test" it will give you how good or bad the unit is and how many data it can write to the driver ... with this super optimized disk write data to the disk on a slower drive can result in a data corruption (on a very slow FFD) ... btw you/we forget to mention than if you leave the disk made with 2MF inserted on the disk and the computer boot from the floppy disk it load 2M into memory, Windows 9x detect it as a "virus" when you boot it ... I don't remember the frozen behavior of Windows 9x when you write data to/from the disk with a normal format or 2MF disk but I remember it when I used a 2MGUI disk ... left add a mark on the video when the 2MGUI start ... 2MGUI can give a lot of fun trying to made the disk with a bigger size, as I say 2MB of free space after format the disk is possible on that 2MB media (on the book the theoretical limit is 2002KB, hehehe) ... btw I buy the physical book back in the days and it come with a disk of the lastest version of the program, bigger than the one you can get online some days after I receive the book at home
I remember using 2M back in the day, but on DSDD 5.25" floppy disks (because that was all I had at that time). It allowed me to store ~420kB on a single floppy.
This brings back memories - I had a whole stash of 2M 1804 floppies back in spring 1995. One very cool thing - if you try to boot from a 2M floppy, it will load the driver, then boot DOS from the hard drive. So you can technically exchange 2M disks with people who don’t have the 2M software.
Back on the DMF video I saw a quick glimpse of 2M and had to comment about it, being a user of the tool back in the day. And now, behold, a full video about it! Some comments about it from distant memories: I seem to remember that 2M (2MDOS, 2MGUI?) was able to inject itself in the boot sector of the disks created by it with a version of its TSR "driver", so you didn't need to load it manually on computers that didn't have the software to read disks formatted by it, you only had to boot the computer with that disk as its first boot device... My memory (of 20+ years ago) tells me it was automatically done on format, but I could be very wrong. I used 2M to store many things, being from a "developing" country disks were not inexpensive so every available bit had to be used, and I have no memories of corruption or data loss that could be attributed to 2M. As I said in the previous video comment, it was (or felt like) magic. Today my technical knowled improved a lot but I'm still in surprised by all the things 2M (and its variants) was capable of doing with the hardware that was available at the time. Many of the diskettes formated with 2M still exist, I believe, so when I go visit relatives I'll look for them, set up an era-proper retropc (I have my first Pentium 166 mobo+cpu+ram, a floppy drive, I just need a video card and a AT power supply) and test them after decades, when/if I do it I'll comment on this video with the news. I know it was not just an answer to my comment specifically, but... thanks A LOT for the video response!!! :)
An use case for these disks is that you can use the SYS command on them, meaning you can boot your PC with a floppy disk of 1.88KB (At least that's the capacity I tried). Moreover I used microsoft's compression on it, meaning that I could store about 3MB of data on a single floppy disk, making it a very big boot floppy. The drawbacks however is that I think it liked to corrupt itself, and it was mega slow.
I remember using this on my 486. I found it on some CD of a PC magazine; on those times, these publications sholved this kind of utilities by scraping BBS or the ancient Internet. I used it to compress with ARJ my ( cof! cof!), "borrowed" games and thanks to that, it saved a floppy or two on some big (for the time) games. The increasing extension of games to fill full CDs and the incompatibility with Windows 9x, made me abandon it.
I’ve always wondered why we didn’t just adopt Japan’s 2.88MB floppies. Were they not even popular in Japan? So weird that the BIOS option was always there but no one was importing 2.88MB drives/floppies.
I always wondered about the 21mb flopiticals. Or the zip alternatives, Sony etc. I think there were 3 other drives (incl Sony) that read floppy but had bigger format native disks. So 2m higher speed or capacity.
@@Michael_Brock Yeah, but the presence of a 2.88MB setting in virtually any 32-bit era BIOS for native support without drivers is what had me intrigued. ;) Made it seem more well-adopted than LS-120, Zip, etc ever were.
As far as you can find info, those drives were not compatible with 1.44MB drives so the incentive to buy one was small and as i read on internet those disks were more than 2 times expensive than 1.44.
@@sanjyuu2298 Yeah, but floppies were so cheap I would’ve gladly paid that for certain applications… and as a second FDD I don’t think I’d mind that it wasn’t reverse compatible either. I recall reading somewhere that my Game Doctor SF7 might have 2.88MB FDD support which would fit most Super Nintendo games on a single floppy. Hong Kong pirate vendors often sold bootleg games on floppy in clear clamshells (much like early Game Boy clamshells) with labels that looked like retail box art, presumably because the clamshell could contain multiple floppies. People were saving HUGE amounts over the original cartridges and since they would have to pay for the extra floppies anyway they may as well have fewer disk swaps… but 2.88MB never caught on there either. The GDSF7 definitely had the option to fit more than 1.44MB when you format the disk and I imagine 1.44MB “retail” bootleg floppies probably killed any chance users would actually use a 2.88MB drive (few could get the ROM files online back then).
They were pretty expensive, there was just a recent switch 720k -> 1.44M and not much people was using them so they never became popular. Though I'm happy I managed to buy a box of such disks and another drive to the one I have already just recently 😛
I always heard rumours and legends about floppy disks being able to store 2 megabytes and that certain tools would be able to unlock that potential. I've never seen that in action until now. It comes with a lot of drawbacks and compromises, but just think of how many fewer floppies we could have used to copy games between friends on the school playground. :D
I vaguely recall spending way too much time going through my floppies and testing which ones I could max out with this utility (seeing if certain brands could handle extra tracks beyond 82 or not, etc). I seem to remember having a severe case of "bit rot" in my floppy collection at some point, probably from pushing things too far, but it was all fun, and inline with the hacker ethos of "now what can I really make this do?"
it's so cool to discover these tools after 25 years - I really wish I knew about them back in the days when an extra byte was important! Thanks for showing us the tool - and congrats for the 10K! Next step 100K, to infinity and beyond! :)
Back in the day, i used to regularly work with disks i formated at 1.75MB, no issues at all. Sometimes, i went as far as 1.8x, but they were more prone to errors. I think i formatted with old dos pqmagic, unsure.
2Mgui have really interresting inner working. It use some trickery to use more of the media (no compression involved). It store 128 bytes sector that have a 16KB length per track (1 x "16KB" sector per track). So no gap between sectors. It use DMA if possible, but can with without DMA, also interrupts have to be disabled each time a track (sector) is read, that probably explain why windows "hang". but in the dos it's the same thing, it's not like you would do something else anyway as you have to wait for the operation to be done.
A standard disk can be pushed even further with an LS240 drive. Those drives used effectively shingled magnetic recording along with other encoding changes to store 32MB on standard 1.44MB media. The normal downsides of SMR apply of course and since the much smaller SuperDIsk read head is necessary to read data from the disk (writing is done with the normal head). Based on the numbers given in the documentation the other encoding changes by themselves would probably have given around 4MB using a standard read/write head (I would assume still requiring different electronics), but for one reason or another that was never pursued.
I am in search of an LS-240 drive! Just a few days ago, I came across an article that mentioned this detail that a standard 1.44 floppy can be formatted to 32MB. Wait would be awesome if I could try that. But drives are rare and super expensive!
@@bitsundbolts Not sure if TH-cam black holed my reply or if it's just sitting in the moderation queue, but in case of the former: The Panasonic LK-RF240U has been easy to find as of late. Just bought one myself and it made it in working condition, although I have heard that the SuperDisk head can be fragile so your mileage may vary.
The issue was though that you had to rewrite the WHOLE DISK when a change was being made. So that's good for quickly using old disks to make one-time transfers from one point to another, but otherwise useless in daily usage.
@@bad.sector Yeah, that's because of the use of SMR. I believe modern high capacity hard drives limit the number of layered tracks to reduce the problem, but obviously if maximizing capacity one would want to do the whole disk in one big group. It is an interesting thought experiment what the story would be if they allowed other formattings to trade off capacity vs speed since like I said in the first post the documentation in the superwriter32 program suggests SMR only accounts for around 9x capacity increase if I recall correctly. So ignoring complications in the math from zoning that puts a theoretical full speed random I/O formatting at around 3.5MB. (Which also wouldn't have required a different exotic head for reading.) I'll also note that while superwriter32 treats the disk more or less like burning a CD. From what I can tell once formatted to 32MB, Linux and read/write to them like normal. Haven't played with that aspect much yet so I could be missing a caveat. Linux also has file system caching so theoretically one would only need to pay the time penalty at eject time.
@@bitsundbolts I still prefer Oliver Fromme HD-Copy for format Diskettes.. and use the Clean Disk and etc. etc..... The 1.68Mb format is awesome and way easy to use in it..... it have his own wikipedia page😯 ... it was the perfect software for pirat🏴☠ 😱 ... I mean.. make legal fair use backup copies 😇 of Windows 95 disks.. .
i am curious if any of these discs are readable in a modern usb floppy drive under windows 10. Back in the day i used vgacopy from thomas mönkemeier, which formatted discs with 1.72mb. These discs are not readably in a usb floppy drive.
I have a 2.88MB floppy drive in my wardrobe. I don't think you will find any floppies for that today, though? I got it from an IBM highest-end 486-based PS/2 back in the 90s.
My dad used to do this. The results weren't always good though. Some disks just ended up with a lot of bad sectors. It's probably due to the difference coating they used for DD and HD disks.
I wonder if they're any tools that start at 21 sectors at the innermost track and a larger number at the outer tracks like the Commodore 1541? Or whether it is possible to use a smaller number of larger sectors to reduce the space wasted by the intersector gaps?
last method looks suspiciously similar to drive compression implemented in windows 9x as an add on i did that with some flopies but then the size was variable depending on a type of data being put in. it was much more iritating when done to a harddrive, which you could do even to a system partition after windows was already installed
That method is really interesting actually. It's not related to compression at all. It use some DMA hackery to store 1 sector per track (and so no gaps). a "128 bytes" sector with a length of "16 KB". It use more of the media without compression. But nothing prevent you from compressing it too ;)
Amazing. I wish I had this program in the early 90's, instead of packing games into ARJ multi-disk archives (arj a /v1440 /r pack c:\) it would pack 2MB each. How much time could be saved in the kid's days as you exchange games with friends.
What is the Unformatted disksize - i assume it can be done - for the interleave and gap space can be ignored - and about LS120 and LS240 - let's be honest - the best floppy tech imho.
My floppy drive only supports up to 82 tracks. I wonder how much usable space you get with 86 tracks. But I would still prefer the faster disks formatted with /F
@@bitsundbolts I just needed a emergency boot floppy with DOS, ansi, smartdrv, QEMM, 4DOS, Novell Netware Client 32, CDROM drivers, Sound drivers, 2 home made patchers (CPU and Chipset). I did it, 7KB free space left! I would use the "fast mode" if my 5 1/4 floppy drive did not have that annoying issue. I high pitch noise that come from the top clamp... I think it's OK to use but I just don't like the noise so I use it the less as possible. Capacity is 1978K. 2Mgui still do better but you lose the possibility to boot
All this is useless when we have the allmighty ARJ, ACE and PKZIP archiving tools! Nonetheless, a very informative and detailed video about lost formats on (almost) obsolete media.
I still prefer Oliver Fromme HD-Copy for format Diskettes.. and use the Clean Disk and etc. etc..... The 1.68Mb format is awesome and way easy to use in it..... it have his own wikipedia page😯 ... it was the perfect software for pirat🏴☠ 😱 ... I mean.. make legal fair use backup copies 😇 of Windows 95 disks.. .
I preferred using VGACOPY/386. It could create floppies of many densities, and to allow it to be readable by DOS/Windows, it would create a 512 byte TSR in the boot record so that it was loaded automatically when you logged onto the disk.
I've just answered about 2M adding a boot sector TSR... then I see your comment and clearly remember using VGACOPY too, so maybe the bootsector TSR was on VGACOPY and not on 2M? Or both did it? I guess I'll have to build that retropc soon to clear up some foggy memories!
I used 2M in my MS-DOS hobby programming days, with 8088 and 286 machines. The variable quality of floppy disks made the sizes above 1.76MB a bit risky for long term reliable storage, but at that size and with ARJ compression you could pretty much halve the number of disks you had to buy and store. With a 40MB HDD you did need to do a fair amount of floppy disk data shuffling. 2M was one of quite a range of handy (or sometimes not so handy) utilities I assessed for the local PC User Group. Another neat trick for recouping otherwise "wasted space" were utilities that aided mapping blocks of high memory (such as onboard Hercules video memory on one system I had) into the system memory area, to obtain more than 640KB of MS-DOS system memory. That made life easier if you wanted to have larger runtime and linking libraries in memory.
arj is nice - but what about LHA - the exe size is also smaller - and LHA supports SFX - i do not know if DOS arj support SFX ?
@@herauthon I did transition to LHA later, but not in conjunction with 2M. By then larger HDD capacity and the acquisition of a Creative 2x speed CD writer made floppies less useful, and the hassle of unique formats less appealing. SFX wasn't a capability I valued just for archiving, so I'm not sure if ARJ could do it.
with 2MGUI you can even reach 2MB (2097152 bytes) of free space on the disk after format it, enable the 84 format track (Ciriaco say almost all of the floppy disk drivers can reach that sector and most of then reach track 84) and trimming the data than one track can handle with clusters of 4 KB (NOTE: on that disk the sectors are divided on 2 tracks) /T=84 /C=128 /F=1 and some more options /G=20 is the default value but you can even reduce it, the same with /X=55 a lower value made the disk faster but if you reduce it too much the disk is much more slower (is a sweet spot), the same happen with /Y=90 ... try "2MGUI d: /test" it will give you how good or bad the unit is and how many data it can write to the driver ... with this super optimized disk write data to the disk on a slower drive can result in a data corruption (on a very slow FFD) ... btw you/we forget to mention than if you leave the disk made with 2MF inserted on the disk and the computer boot from the floppy disk it load 2M into memory, Windows 9x detect it as a "virus" when you boot it ... I don't remember the frozen behavior of Windows 9x when you write data to/from the disk with a normal format or 2MF disk but I remember it when I used a 2MGUI disk ... left add a mark on the video when the 2MGUI start ... 2MGUI can give a lot of fun trying to made the disk with a bigger size, as I say 2MB of free space after format the disk is possible on that 2MB media (on the book the theoretical limit is 2002KB, hehehe) ... btw I buy the physical book back in the days and it come with a disk of the lastest version of the program, bigger than the one you can get online some days after I receive the book at home
can't wait to see you blow up 🎉!
I remember using 2M back in the day, but on DSDD 5.25" floppy disks (because that was all I had at that time). It allowed me to store ~420kB on a single floppy.
This brings back memories - I had a whole stash of 2M 1804 floppies back in spring 1995.
One very cool thing - if you try to boot from a 2M floppy, it will load the driver, then boot DOS from the hard drive. So you can technically exchange 2M disks with people who don’t have the 2M software.
Back on the DMF video I saw a quick glimpse of 2M and had to comment about it, being a user of the tool back in the day. And now, behold, a full video about it! Some comments about it from distant memories: I seem to remember that 2M (2MDOS, 2MGUI?) was able to inject itself in the boot sector of the disks created by it with a version of its TSR "driver", so you didn't need to load it manually on computers that didn't have the software to read disks formatted by it, you only had to boot the computer with that disk as its first boot device... My memory (of 20+ years ago) tells me it was automatically done on format, but I could be very wrong. I used 2M to store many things, being from a "developing" country disks were not inexpensive so every available bit had to be used, and I have no memories of corruption or data loss that could be attributed to 2M. As I said in the previous video comment, it was (or felt like) magic. Today my technical knowled improved a lot but I'm still in surprised by all the things 2M (and its variants) was capable of doing with the hardware that was available at the time. Many of the diskettes formated with 2M still exist, I believe, so when I go visit relatives I'll look for them, set up an era-proper retropc (I have my first Pentium 166 mobo+cpu+ram, a floppy drive, I just need a video card and a AT power supply) and test them after decades, when/if I do it I'll comment on this video with the news. I know it was not just an answer to my comment specifically, but... thanks A LOT for the video response!!! :)
An use case for these disks is that you can use the SYS command on them, meaning you can boot your PC with a floppy disk of 1.88KB (At least that's the capacity I tried). Moreover I used microsoft's compression on it, meaning that I could store about 3MB of data on a single floppy disk, making it a very big boot floppy.
The drawbacks however is that I think it liked to corrupt itself, and it was mega slow.
I remember using this on my 486. I found it on some CD of a PC magazine; on those times, these publications sholved this kind of utilities by scraping BBS or the ancient Internet.
I used it to compress with ARJ my ( cof! cof!), "borrowed" games and thanks to that, it saved a floppy or two on some big (for the time) games.
The increasing extension of games to fill full CDs and the incompatibility with Windows 9x, made me abandon it.
I’ve always wondered why we didn’t just adopt Japan’s 2.88MB floppies. Were they not even popular in Japan? So weird that the BIOS option was always there but no one was importing 2.88MB drives/floppies.
I always wondered about the 21mb flopiticals. Or the zip alternatives, Sony etc. I think there were 3 other drives (incl Sony) that read floppy but had bigger format native disks.
So 2m higher speed or capacity.
@@Michael_Brock Yeah, but the presence of a 2.88MB setting in virtually any 32-bit era BIOS for native support without drivers is what had me intrigued. ;) Made it seem more well-adopted than LS-120, Zip, etc ever were.
As far as you can find info, those drives were not compatible with 1.44MB drives so the incentive to buy one was small and as i read on internet those disks were more than 2 times expensive than 1.44.
@@sanjyuu2298 Yeah, but floppies were so cheap I would’ve gladly paid that for certain applications… and as a second FDD I don’t think I’d mind that it wasn’t reverse compatible either. I recall reading somewhere that my Game Doctor SF7 might have 2.88MB FDD support which would fit most Super Nintendo games on a single floppy. Hong Kong pirate vendors often sold bootleg games on floppy in clear clamshells (much like early Game Boy clamshells) with labels that looked like retail box art, presumably because the clamshell could contain multiple floppies. People were saving HUGE amounts over the original cartridges and since they would have to pay for the extra floppies anyway they may as well have fewer disk swaps… but 2.88MB never caught on there either.
The GDSF7 definitely had the option to fit more than 1.44MB when you format the disk and I imagine 1.44MB “retail” bootleg floppies probably killed any chance users would actually use a 2.88MB drive (few could get the ROM files online back then).
They were pretty expensive, there was just a recent switch 720k -> 1.44M and not much people was using them so they never became popular. Though I'm happy I managed to buy a box of such disks and another drive to the one I have already just recently 😛
I always heard rumours and legends about floppy disks being able to store 2 megabytes and that certain tools would be able to unlock that potential. I've never seen that in action until now. It comes with a lot of drawbacks and compromises, but just think of how many fewer floppies we could have used to copy games between friends on the school playground. :D
I vaguely recall spending way too much time going through my floppies and testing which ones I could max out with this utility (seeing if certain brands could handle extra tracks beyond 82 or not, etc). I seem to remember having a severe case of "bit rot" in my floppy collection at some point, probably from pushing things too far, but it was all fun, and inline with the hacker ethos of "now what can I really make this do?"
it's so cool to discover these tools after 25 years - I really wish I knew about them back in the days when an extra byte was important! Thanks for showing us the tool - and congrats for the 10K! Next step 100K, to infinity and beyond! :)
Back in the day, i used to regularly work with disks i formated at 1.75MB, no issues at all. Sometimes, i went as far as 1.8x, but they were more prone to errors.
I think i formatted with old dos pqmagic, unsure.
Nice video. Pleasant memories of the time when I used the 2M format
Bits und Bolts the ultimate discjuggler. Just a fantastic job, if I only had your insights in the early 90s.
2Mgui have really interresting inner working. It use some trickery to use more of the media (no compression involved).
It store 128 bytes sector that have a 16KB length per track (1 x "16KB" sector per track). So no gap between sectors.
It use DMA if possible, but can with without DMA, also interrupts have to be disabled each time a track (sector) is read, that probably explain why windows "hang". but in the dos it's the same thing, it's not like you would do something else anyway as you have to wait for the operation to be done.
A standard disk can be pushed even further with an LS240 drive. Those drives used effectively shingled magnetic recording along with other encoding changes to store 32MB on standard 1.44MB media. The normal downsides of SMR apply of course and since the much smaller SuperDIsk read head is necessary to read data from the disk (writing is done with the normal head). Based on the numbers given in the documentation the other encoding changes by themselves would probably have given around 4MB using a standard read/write head (I would assume still requiring different electronics), but for one reason or another that was never pursued.
I am in search of an LS-240 drive! Just a few days ago, I came across an article that mentioned this detail that a standard 1.44 floppy can be formatted to 32MB. Wait would be awesome if I could try that. But drives are rare and super expensive!
@@bitsundbolts Not sure if TH-cam black holed my reply or if it's just sitting in the moderation queue, but in case of the former: The Panasonic LK-RF240U has been easy to find as of late. Just bought one myself and it made it in working condition, although I have heard that the SuperDisk head can be fragile so your mileage may vary.
The issue was though that you had to rewrite the WHOLE DISK when a change was being made. So that's good for quickly using old disks to make one-time transfers from one point to another, but otherwise useless in daily usage.
@@bad.sector Yeah, that's because of the use of SMR. I believe modern high capacity hard drives limit the number of layered tracks to reduce the problem, but obviously if maximizing capacity one would want to do the whole disk in one big group. It is an interesting thought experiment what the story would be if they allowed other formattings to trade off capacity vs speed since like I said in the first post the documentation in the superwriter32 program suggests SMR only accounts for around 9x capacity increase if I recall correctly. So ignoring complications in the math from zoning that puts a theoretical full speed random I/O formatting at around 3.5MB. (Which also wouldn't have required a different exotic head for reading.)
I'll also note that while superwriter32 treats the disk more or less like burning a CD. From what I can tell once formatted to 32MB, Linux and read/write to them like normal. Haven't played with that aspect much yet so I could be missing a caveat. Linux also has file system caching so theoretically one would only need to pay the time penalty at eject time.
@@bitsundbolts I still prefer Oliver Fromme HD-Copy for format Diskettes.. and use the Clean Disk and etc. etc..... The 1.68Mb format is awesome and way easy to use in it..... it have his own wikipedia page😯 ... it was the perfect software for pirat🏴☠ 😱 ... I mean.. make legal fair use backup copies 😇 of Windows 95 disks.. .
i am curious if any of these discs are readable in a modern usb floppy drive under windows 10. Back in the day i used vgacopy from thomas mönkemeier, which formatted discs with 1.72mb. These discs are not readably in a usb floppy drive.
Very interesting! Congratulations on 10K!
used to keep all my backups using this software.
Wow, another useful video, keep it up...
I have a 2.88MB floppy drive in my wardrobe. I don't think you will find any floppies for that today, though?
I got it from an IBM highest-end 486-based PS/2 back in the 90s.
I remember converting low density 720KiB to high density 1.44MiB with a drill.
My dad used to do this. The results weren't always good though. Some disks just ended up with a lot of bad sectors. It's probably due to the difference coating they used for DD and HD disks.
I wonder if they're any tools that start at 21 sectors at the innermost track and a larger number at the outer tracks like the Commodore 1541? Or whether it is possible to use a smaller number of larger sectors to reduce the space wasted by the intersector gaps?
for that to work you would require a variable data rate, something a normal ibm-compatible floppy controller doesn't support.
I use FFORMAT program for that
last method looks suspiciously similar to drive compression implemented in windows 9x as an add on
i did that with some flopies but then the size was variable depending on a type of data being put in. it was much more iritating when done to a harddrive, which you could do even to a system partition after windows was already installed
That method is really interesting actually. It's not related to compression at all.
It use some DMA hackery to store 1 sector per track (and so no gaps).
a "128 bytes" sector with a length of "16 KB".
It use more of the media without compression. But nothing prevent you from compressing it too ;)
Amazing. I wish I had this program in the early 90's, instead of packing games into ARJ multi-disk archives (arj a /v1440 /r pack c:\) it would pack 2MB each. How much time could be saved in the kid's days as you exchange games with friends.
Can full disk compression be put on top of this? This was a fascinating watch, along with your previous video on 3.5” storage capacities.
It should be possible, but I haven't tried that yet. Maybe something worth to look at in the future.
What is the Unformatted disksize - i assume it can be done - for the interleave and gap space can be ignored - and about LS120 and LS240 - let's be honest - the best floppy tech imho.
Alright, now add disk compression 😆
Looks like they managed to squeeze in two more sectors per track over fdformat. How did they do it?
Maybe by putting more sectors on the outer tracks?
Nice!
ok, nice video :)
Good info :)
Thank you Atheatos!
Yet another proof on how M$oft oversimplified the diskette access making further optimization impossible
So the /M option is 82 track, 23 sectors per track
I know my flop drive accept 86 tracks, let's try to make a bootable flop with that...
My floppy drive only supports up to 82 tracks. I wonder how much usable space you get with 86 tracks. But I would still prefer the faster disks formatted with /F
@@bitsundbolts I just needed a emergency boot floppy with DOS, ansi, smartdrv, QEMM, 4DOS, Novell Netware Client 32, CDROM drivers, Sound drivers, 2 home made patchers (CPU and Chipset). I did it, 7KB free space left!
I would use the "fast mode" if my 5 1/4 floppy drive did not have that annoying issue. I high pitch noise that come from the top clamp... I think it's OK to use but I just don't like the noise so I use it the less as possible.
Capacity is 1978K. 2Mgui still do better but you lose the possibility to boot
Does this work with freedos?
All this is useless when we have the allmighty ARJ, ACE and PKZIP archiving tools!
Nonetheless, a very informative and detailed video about lost formats on (almost) obsolete media.
eh, where is my 1995th....
i use this lot 90's now i wanna try this on gotek.
I still prefer Oliver Fromme HD-Copy for format Diskettes.. and use the Clean Disk and etc. etc..... The 1.68Mb format is awesome and way easy to use in it..... it have his own wikipedia page😯 ... it was the perfect software for pirat🏴☠ 😱 ... I mean.. make legal fair use backup copies 😇 of Windows 95 disks.. .
I preferred using VGACOPY/386. It could create floppies of many densities, and to allow it to be readable by DOS/Windows, it would create a 512 byte TSR in the boot record so that it was loaded automatically when you logged onto the disk.
I've just answered about 2M adding a boot sector TSR... then I see your comment and clearly remember using VGACOPY too, so maybe the bootsector TSR was on VGACOPY and not on 2M? Or both did it? I guess I'll have to build that retropc soon to clear up some foggy memories!