VOGONS


First post, by Grzyb

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Recently I've been archiving software that was sold in the early 90s at the computer bazaars in Poland - all 5.25" diskettes, both 360 KB DD and 1.2 MB HD ones.

But there was also something more interesting there: 5.25" HD diskettes formatted to 1.44 MB, with 18 sectors/track, exactly like 3.5" HD.
The reason is obvious: there was a time window when the 3.5" standard already prevailed in the West, but its adoption in the East was slower - it was 20% greater capacity for about 100% greater price...

Now, the question:
What software was used to copy 3.5" HD -> 5.25" HD ?

I'm aware of 800.COM, but it only allows for 17 sectors/track:

800.png
Filename
800.png
File size
5.68 KiB
Views
813 views
File license
Public domain

Anyway, after 30 years, about 2/3 of those noname floppies, overclocked by 20%, was still readable without errors.

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.

Reply 2 of 39, by BitWrangler

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I always had the impression that 1.2 was more popular in German than rest of Europe but a few West Germans I have talked to on the subject have denied this. So I guess it might be the case that more 1.2MB stuff was SOLD in W. Germany, because of ppl coming from East and a little further afield to buy it.

There were some utils for making 1.44 to 1.7MB that were more flexible than just doing that, and I had 720s up to 800 and 360s to 400 with them, so see no reason why they wouldn't be useful on 1.2Mbs, basically whatever was on Simtel in disk utilities area.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 3 of 39, by VivienM

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The best (I think) program for 3.5" floppies was 2M. Default was 1804 KB on a 3.5", and if you were willing to accept lower performance you could go higher than that.

I'm not sure what it can do with 5.25" disks...

Reply 4 of 39, by Horun

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Not sure what was used, we never had anything that could do that reliably in usa. Would really like to see a disk image of one of those 1.44mb > 1.2Mb disks, it might hold clues....
Am wondering if maybe a MS drivespace backup or similar.

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 5 of 39, by Grzyb

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Horun wrote on 2024-12-19, 03:50:

Not sure what was used, we never had anything that could do that reliably in usa. Would really like to see a disk image of one of those 1.44mb > 1.2Mb disks, it might hold clues....
Am wondering if maybe a MS drivespace backup or similar.

I guess a disk image from KryoFlux or Greaseweazle would be interesting, but I don't have such equipment.
I just use DskImage to make regular images - nothing special in this case, they look exactly like 3.5" HD images, see the attached example...

Definitely nothing to do with any disk compression software!

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  • Filename
    example.rar
    File size
    1.21 MiB
    Downloads
    12 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.

Reply 6 of 39, by Deunan

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Grzyb wrote on 2024-12-19, 01:55:

But there was also something more interesting there: 5.25" HD diskettes formatted to 1.44 MB, with 18 sectors/track, exactly like 3.5" HD.

FDFORMAT or something to that effect. I used FDFORMAT back in the day quite a bit. It can do much more than that, including denser 3.5" formats as well (Win9x install floppies used this trick too, and/or MS Office floppy version). Obviously it's less reliable, and also:

- 18 sectors on 5.25" media will be readable and shoudl also be writable under DOS without any extra steps or resident software. This is because the signature byte in the boot sector is the same as for 3.5" 1.44MB floppy format and DOS, being a very dumb OS, only really uses that byte and nothing else to figure out the format. Pretty much the only thing that checks the floppy drive type is the FORMAT program.
- Any other interesting formats will require FDREAD to be resident to even access the data (but that TSR also allows writing, don't be fooled by the name). Otherwise you'll get a DOS error right away (invalid media, or unformatted, etc). Again this is because DOS doesn't check the BPB as it should and only supports a handful of hardcoded floppy formats based on the media byte alone.
- MS install floppies either required Win9x or the installer to be running already, thus bypassing DOS stupidity and in general being faster too due to larger RAM buffers. That being said even Windows might not be able to propery support some of the weirder formats created with FDFORMAT software.
- It's also possible to squeeze even more data on the floppy since pretty much every drive out there can step to track 82 before it hits a hard stop. At least I've never found any that could not. So that's three extra cylinders of data space if formatted. On DD drives you can step to 41 and that's it, but that is also some "free real estate".

Reply 7 of 39, by Jo22

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BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-19, 03:17:

I always had the impression that 1.2 was more popular in German than rest of Europe but a few West Germans I have talked to on the subject have denied this. So I guess it might be the case that more 1.2MB stuff was SOLD in W. Germany, because of ppl coming from East and a little further afield to buy it.

There were some utils for making 1.44 to 1.7MB that were more flexible than just doing that, and I had 720s up to 800 and 360s to 400 with them, so see no reason why they wouldn't be useful on 1.2Mbs, basically whatever was on Simtel in disk utilities area.

Hi, 5,25" 1,2 MB floppies had been used regulary by my father in early 90s.
We're from both W-Germany and also had already lived in a W-German city back then.
According to my father, the 5,1/4" 1,2 MB floppy was lower in price and could also be stacked so nicely!? 🤷‍♂️

The 1,2 MB type also was commonly used by some disk stations in computer shops, I vaguely remember. 360K type was available, too, but it barely held enough information.
You had bought a fresh/clean 5,25" floppy in the shop and could then enter the program number from software catalogue.
The copier station would then copy over the public domain/shareware/freeware program onto the floppy disk.

I can't say much about the East Germans, though. Neither good or bad.
Because back then I didn't really realize them as such in daily life. Unless they spoke in thick Saxon accent, for example.
To me, they were just other Germans, like ordinary people, albeit acting a little bit strange at times, which I couldn't really define at the time.
I guess they tried their best to not stick out after re-union.

It wasn't until much later when the wave of Ostalgie (east-talgia, a pun of east+nostalgia) and GDR fandom in the media broke out.
Coincidally, that's about the time when we got visits from a certain acquaintance of our family who's from former GDR.

The stories that this acquaintance told were quite distorted at times, or so it seemed to me. Another world, in short. That's when our reality shattered a bit.
Reading between the lines there was a mix of disappointment and inferior complexes shining through that I haven't really realized in daily life in the years before.
Apparently, there was ongoing frustration because the job market had caused trouble and integration was hard?

There also was a bit of dislike against the West, democracy and so on.
Apparently, we were considered the mean and snobby guys for some reason (and I thought we helped them). As if it wasn't enough that we're considered the Nazis everywhere already. Sigh.

That was new to me back then, because I wasn't areally aware of all of this East vs West drama. I thought it was all distant history already.
Anyway, I don’t mean to generalize. I want to believe that this acquaintance was/is more of the exception than the rule.

As a possible explanation, I think that person was still a teenager or twenty something when the GDR folded, so the positive memories of "the good old times" in GDR did overweight maybe.
In the NVA (GDR army), for example, they basically got croceries from the West I was told.
So life was different to these young people in comparison to their parents at home.

The reason I mention this at all is because there's seemingly a lot of stuff that's not apparent at first view. There's more.
You think you're certain about something, but then *poof* it turns out there's another form of truth or parallel reality you haven't really realized.
And depending who you ask you get opposite views, too.

For example, some former East German lady I've talked to even denied the existance of computers in GDR as a whole, which can't be true of course.
Sites like robotrontechnik.de say otherwise, after all.

In terms of computers, I think, a certain percentage of Germans in early 90s still had an interest in slightly outdated, but very affordable computers.
Like reasonable fast 286 PCs with VGA graphics and maybe 1,2 MB drives.
On plain DOS, they were sufficient for most tasks.
Lemmings and Prince of Persia ran fine, after all.

That being said, the 5,1/4" 1,2 MB drive had been carried over way into the Pentium days.
It wasn't unusual to see a big tower with a CD writer and a 5,25" drive in another drive bay.
The 1,2 MB drive was perceived being just as normal as the 1,44 MB drive.

Seriously, almost all used 386/486 PCs I got from ads in Sperrmüll-Zeitung (a special newspaper dedicated to private advertisements about second-hand stuff, a bit like Craig's List I suppose) had Prince of Persia installed! 😁 And a copy of Norton Commander. Often versions 3 to 5.x.
So Prince of Persia must have been a must have of some sort?
Makes me wonder how much of a factor the game played for the previous owners when acquiring their PC.

Last edited by Jo22 on 2024-12-19, 11:46. Edited 1 time in total.

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 8 of 39, by Mr.Hunt

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old software PU1700, try to use...

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Last edited by Mr.Hunt on 2024-12-19, 11:48. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 9 of 39, by wierd_w

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If the media is good enough, 'lie', tell the cmos that the 1.2 drive is a 1.44 drive, then just format it as 1.44.

Sometimes the bios will catch the lie and complain about drive failures, but usually you can get away with it.

Reply 10 of 39, by Grzyb

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wierd_w wrote on 2024-12-19, 11:45:

If the media is good enough, 'lie', tell the cmos that the 1.2 drive is a 1.44 drive, then just format it as 1.44.

Sometimes the bios will catch the lie and complain about drive failures, but usually you can get away with it.

Aren't BIOSes only able to distinguish between 40-track and 80-track drives, by trying to seek beyond the 40th track?

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.

Reply 12 of 39, by SuperDeadite

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You mean 9 sectors per side right? As far as I know there are two different format options for using 9 sectors to fit 1.44mbs on 1.2mb 5.25" floppies: 2HDE and 2HS. Never understood why two format options exist when they do basically the exact same thing, but they are different formats. They were quite popular in Japan with the "doujin" dev groups. Especially on X68000.

Personally I like "DPACK" very powerful and easy to use. Supports almost any format you can think of.

https://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dos/util/se0222 … M020xAiIBWnJqHs

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Reply 14 of 39, by BitWrangler

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Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-19, 11:41:

The 1,2 MB type also was commonly used by some disk stations in computer shops, I vaguely remember. 360K type was available, too, but it barely held enough information.
You had bought a fresh/clean 5,25" floppy in the shop and could then enter the program number from software catalogue.
The copier station would then copy over the public domain/shareware/freeware program onto the floppy disk.

off topic

There was a system like that, that appeared "late" in the UK. For at least three years that I had known about several computer stores had a box of PD/shareware pre-written disks to rummage through at low prices. Thus a maximum reasonable price had been established there, and the more expensive ones came in a single disk box with printed inlay with description, contents, some instructions maybe.

So at about twice the price of those, in 1996ish I think, there was this "disk bank" thing, bright yellow 1.44MB disk, and for your money, you got "one write" as it were, and where you got 10 utilities on a prewritten PD disk, this would have them all separate, so you might just get 50kb file for your payment. Very few archives on there which were near a full disk worth. Selection also limited, you'd see more files on a CD. So it seemed they only had a couple of hundred MB of storage in the thing. In say 1991, this would have been somewhat amazing, but it was 1996, you could maybe get on the internet in a library, we were getting free internet trials all over the place, even at peak phone rates you'd spend less to get a single file. The machine also didn't seem to take up less space or have more possibilities than the average ~500 title "box of shareware" you could look through. When they'd got through all the people like me who would use it once for curiosity, they sat gathering dust then disappeared. It could have been great in concept, but big fail in implementation in that version.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 15 of 39, by Disruptor

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Well, you may try VGACopy.
It is freeware now. https://archive.org/details/vgacp625

To open 1.44 MB 5.25" floppies in DOS, you may try to search for the VGARead driver.

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  • Filename
    VGAREAD.7z
    File size
    557 Bytes
    Downloads
    17 downloads
    File comment
    DOS driver to read custom floppy formats
    File license
    Public domain

Reply 16 of 39, by Deunan

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Jo22 wrote on 2024-12-19, 11:41:

You had bought a fresh/clean 5,25" floppy in the shop and could then enter the program number from software catalogue.
The copier station would then copy over the public domain/shareware/freeware program onto the floppy disk.

Where I lived we also had a similar thing in the early days, with the 5.25" floppies also being the most popular at the time due to lower price. But there were some tiny differences. The floppies didn't need to be bought in the shop, you could bring your own to lower the price a bit. The "copier station" was just a PC behind the counter operated by the seller. The price was calculated per floppy count, although some more business-savvy sellers would also ask more for copies of the most popular items in the software catalogue. And speaking of catalogue... well let's just say it wasn't all public domain/shareware/freeware. Actually far from it.

Reply 17 of 39, by Grzyb

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SuperDeadite wrote on 2024-12-19, 13:48:

You mean 9 sectors per side right?

No.
I've read the floppies with "DSKIMAGE x:80:2:18" - exactly like normal 3.5" HD 1.44 MB.

2 sides
80 tracks per side
18 sectors per track
512 Bytes per sector

1474560 Bytes total

I understand that certain platforms can use 9 sectors * 1024 Bytes - and I guess that would be helpful in maxing out the disk capacity: fewer sectors = fewer intersector gaps = less space lost for the gaps.
But that's definitely not the case here.

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.

Reply 19 of 39, by Grzyb

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Deunan wrote on 2024-12-19, 11:36:

- 18 sectors on 5.25" media will be readable and shoudl also be writable under DOS without any extra steps or resident software. This is because the signature byte in the boot sector is the same as for 3.5" 1.44MB floppy format and DOS, being a very dumb OS, only really uses that byte and nothing else to figure out the format. Pretty much the only thing that checks the floppy drive type is the FORMAT program.

Exactly - I didn't need to load any driver/TSR.
DOS normally reads files from 5.25" 1.44 MB, DskImage normally images them, and so does DiskDupe.

But no luck in making my own 5.25" 1.44 MB floppies as of yet - all those non-standard formatters failed.
I'm blaming my special four-floppy FDC - it has its own BIOS, there's no floppy drives declared in CMOS Setup, which may be enough to confuse non-standard software.
Oh well, I will try again when I aquire a more standard setup...

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.