In fact, I have solved them already, by implementing a 2nd parallel MFM decoder in the MEGA65's floppy controller, that runs at 2x the data rate of the main decoder. (1) and (2) are the easiest ones to solve.
We need a common disk image format that can be used for all variants of the above, to ease software development, and make it possible to run these images from SD card. That's how the Amiga gets 880KB on a DD disk, compared to the 1581's 800KB.Ĥ. By reducing the inter-sector gaps, it is possible to fit more sectors on a track. For mastering disks for games/software distribution, we don't care about write-ability (at least not on all tracks), but we would really like to be able to cram as much data as possible onto a disk. The disk format should allow creating disks that can be written to using the MEGA65's floppy controller, if that is the user's intention.ģ.
The resulting disks should work with the C65 DOS, without modification, at least to the extent of being able to get a directory listing, and load one modest size program from it.Ģ. There are several challenges that I would like to attack in doing this:ġ.
In fact, this thought was triggered exactly by wanting to fit 1MB maps for his kart-racer game for the MEGA65 onto a disk. One of the key ones, is that the MEGA65's advanced features mean that its quite conceivable to imagine a game that would like more than 800KB of data on a disk. While we could just stick to DD media, there are some good reasons to support HD media. The internal floppy drive in the MEGA65 is actually a standard PC-compatible HD / 1.44MB floppy drive, so while the C65 DOS only understands DD disks, the hardware is capable of more.