DOS Floppy Disc Formats

I recently acquired a floppy drive emulator. I can't say I have too much free time to play with such useless things, but I had the strange desire of getting one of these beasts.

I did have trouble setting up some virtual images -- as there are not any predefined formats in the tools provided.

I ended up with this table, which I keep here for reference:

Drive DS/DD DS/HD DS/ED SS/DD SS/DD DS/DD DS/DD DS/HD
Form Factor 3.5" 3.5" 3.5" 5.25" 5.25" 5.25" 5.25" 5.25"
Track Density low high high low low low low high
Capacity (kBytes) 720 1,440 2,880 160 180 320 360 1,200
Cylinders 80 80 80 40 40 40 40 80
Heads 2 2 2 1 1 2 2 2
Sectors 9 18 36 8 9 8 9 15
Start Sector 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Sector Size (bytes) 512 512 512 512 512 512 512 512
Data Rate (kbps) 250 500 1,000 300 300 300 300 500
GAP3 (access/format) 27/80 27/108 27/83 42/80 42/80 42/80 42/80 27/84
SR/HUT 0xdf 0xdf 0xdf 0xdf 0xdf 0xdf 0xdf 0xdf
Interleave 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1 1:1
Head Skew 0 0 0 -- -- 0 0 0
Cylinder Skew 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Encoding MFM MFM MFM MFM MFM MFM MFM MFM

source: The Fdio Project

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