6.8 megabyte floppy image on Gotek? \ VOGONS

6.8 megabyte floppy image on Gotek?

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First post, by keenerb

Posted on 2018-02-21, 13:34

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I've never seen this mentioned before, but apparently you can create super-large floppy disks to use with an HxC-enabled Gotek floppy device, even on DSDD systems.

I've created both a 2.5 megabyte DSDD image, and a 6.8 megabyte DSHD image, and they appear to work perfectly well.

I was tinkering around in the "DOS Floppy Disk File Browser" and noticed that there were some oddball FAT12 sizes. I created an image with it, dragged a bunch of files over, and I'm now booting directly off of a 6.8 megabyte disk image.

That is large enough to ditch my XT-IDE adapter and free up an ISA slot, to be honest, especially since I can have a hundred 6.8mb floppy images...

I can't be the first one to try this, so is there a catch? Are apps beyond the simple games I've tried going to have problems? Will the disks get corrupted over time?

Reply 1 of 6, by Zup

Posted on 2018-02-21, 13:49

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The more obvious catch is that you're accessing it at floppy speed. To maintain floppy drive controller compatibility your Gotek won't be able to send any data faster than 500 kbps... I guess that's faster than some first generation HDDs, but it is definitely slower than any IDE HDD.

So, I guess that in old XT computers (i.e.: Amstrad PC1512) the performance loss won't be critical, but if you try to do the same trick in a 486 it will be very noticeable.

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Reply 2 of 6, by keenerb

Posted on 2018-02-21, 14:10

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Yeah, but I'm running this on an XT system, so it's not cripplingly slow...

Reply 3 of 6, by keenerb

Posted on 2018-02-22, 14:30

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The large Gotek images seem to work very well on recent versions of MS-DOS, but Tandy DOS 3.3 complains about FAT corruption and refuses to access any data on the volume. I ran through quite a few games yesterday, letting them loop through demo modes for a little while each.

Ultima 3/4/5, a handful of SSI gold-box games, some Sierra graphical adventures, Legacy of the Ancients, and a few other miscellaneous titles all ran perfectly from a 6.8mb virtual floppy disk image. It is pretty slow, unsurprisingly.

I was able to install MSDOS 6.22 and DR-DOS 7.03 from 1.44mb images after some manual SYS'ing of a drive image, file copying, disk labeling, and etc. I only have a single HxC gotek currently, but I'm going to try to install MSDOS 6.22 from one of these images to a 6.8mb floppy image as soon as I can, out of curiosity.

Something about the larger disk images seems to confuse hxcfs pretty severely, though.

I'm going to see if the FlashFloppy HxC alternative firmware works with these formats by this weekend. Basically any game I would play on an XT system fits in 2.5mb of space with the exception of a few large graphical adventures, so adding a Gotek with a bunch of 2.5mb images is a huge upgrade to my Tandy 1000EX/HX systems!

Reply 4 of 6, by Jo22

Posted on 2018-02-25, 09:39

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FlashFloppy v0.9.11a got released just recently. 😀

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Reply 5 of 6, by JLPedro

Posted on 2018-02-25, 10:32

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Isn't the Nformat biospatch.sys required to use this 2.5MB DSDD and 6.8MB DSHD removing the issues with data corruption and correct handling of the new sizes?

I've been using 2.5MB disk images on Tandy 1000HX computer with biospatch.sys loaded on DOS 6.22 Boot disk. Can't seem to make it work on the 2.1 and 3.3 DOS tandy version. I use Gotek with HXC firmware.

Reply 6 of 6, by Sphere478

Posted on 2022-03-08, 21:26

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Can you upload that image with dos 7.2 on it? Or a blank one? Or both?

Curious, was 6.8 the largest possible? Or is more possible?

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