How Amiga DiskSpare Saved 984k on a DD Floppy Disk

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Rob Smith is working on an update to DiskFlashback and wanted to add support for the Amiga’s DiskSpare.device disk format. While investigating how the format worked, he decided to share his findings.

When set up in Workbench on the Amiga, the DiskSpare.device allowed formatting a double-density floppy disk with up to 984k capacity. If a user had a high-density drive, the capacity could reach up to 1968k.

Rob managed to hack DiskFlashback to store 1.066MB by increasing the number of sectors per track to 13, which significantly sped up the writing process. Although this worked fine with a PC drive running from Windows, the Amiga couldn’t read it and would never have been able to write back to it.

It is still available to download from Aminet – Diskspr3.lha

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