Tracks Per Pound

A couple of months ago I reviewed one of H. C. Andersen's new utilities. The second is Diskfix.

This is not, as it may first sound, yet another Disc Doctor program. In fact, it provides support for 80 track drives to be used with your standard vesion of OS-9. When run, the program will allow you to select one or two sided discs, 40 or 80 tracks. It then formats the disc to your new specification and writes new 80 track drivers to the disc (it creates a new version of OS-9 boot for those that want to know).

If 40 tracks are selected, then double pulses are sent to the drive for track movement - i.e. the 80 track drive moves two of its 'tracks' for every one of a 40 track disc. Of course, it goes without saying that you must have the hardware to support all of this, i.e. a single or double sided 80 track disc drive; you cannot use a 40 track disc drive (such as the standard Dragon Data drive) with this software.

Once the disc has been formatted and the drivers installed, the Diskfix program is not needed to use the 80 track discs. The advantage is that (with a suitable drive) you get four times as much space to one disc as you would using the standard Dragon drive and format program. The disadvantage is price - £80.

If you're an OS-9 user and have 80 track drives, then you must decide for yourself on the value of this software; it certainly does exactly what it claims to do. If you don't already have a 80 track drive, then the cost of one plus this software would add up to an awful lot of blank discs.

Requires: Dragon 64 with disc drive and OS-9 system

Brian Cadge