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The Amigas can read/write 720KB DD PC floppies but indeed not HD floppies. Starting with the A600 they had an internal IDE port. The "ACSI" port of the ST is a
by daneel_w 4y ago
The Amigas can read/write 720KB DD PC floppies but indeed not HD floppies. Starting with the A600 they had an internal IDE port. The "ACSI" port of the ST is a custom/proprietary port which needs an active adapter to interface with standard SCSI.
- rbanffy 4y agoUnfortunately, the 600 was too expensive and too slow by the time it was released.
- daneel_w 4y agoThey cost a fair share, and Commodore didn't really keep the required momentum after the A1000/500/2000, but most advanced computers of their time cost a bit of money. It's hard to say they didn't make a sizable dent, when both Commodore and Atari held almost the entire European 16/32-bit home computer market of the second half of the 80s and the early 90s. Additionally, both had tons of productivity software next to their massive game libraries.
- snvzz 4y agoAll Amiga can read/write arbitrary DD and HD floppy formats, as the "controller" is actually pretty dumb, reading and writing whole tracks in magnetic flux format. The CPU (with help from Agnus's blitter in some versions of trackdisk.device) would encode/decode blocks into sectors into tracks, including MFM encoding. But the floppy drive they bundled was DD, and to get HD you needed an HD floppy drive capable of spinning at half speed. There's few models with that feature. A4000 bundled one such drive. The relevant chip (PAULA, which also was the interrupt controller and handled audio and serial port besides floppy) was sadly never upgraded throughout the history of the Amiga.