3 inch floppy?

[Jim Pez]

Did the Atari 800 have a 3 inch floppy drive?

[Austin]

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/121489-atari-and-a-35-inch-disk-drive/

[Bryan]

Atari made a 1055 3.5" drive prototype that never made it to production and Amdek sold a 3" drive for the Atari that used an unusual 3" disk. I don't know if any standard 3.5" drives were actually produced by anyone.

 

You can see the 1055 at the bottom of this page:

http://www.2600connection.com/interviews/tom_palecki/interview_tom_palecki.html

 

And the Amdek here:

http://www.museo8bits.com/wiki/images/4/46/Amdek_AMDC_02.jpg

[TXG/MNX]

Yes I got the Amdek 3" drive only my unit has only 1 diskdrive in it. It was the Atari version with sio connector on the back.

 

https://www.google.nl/search?q=atari+amdek+diskdrive&prmd=ismvn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjHxpeq_JPRAhUNMVAKHTUcA1gQ_AUIBygB&biw=360&bih=559&dpr=2#imgrc=vZyY98gOqENEJM%3A

 

Sent from UMI hammer with Tapatalk

[+Larry]

Another Atari route to a 3-1/2" drive is the Percom. The Percom controller (on the versions that do double density, at least) can accommodate a pair of 3-1/2" drives. But there is no way that I know of to get UltraSpeed on a Percom, and any regular Atari drive is dead slow in DD at 1X SIO. I configured a Percom this way and tested it years ago using MyDos, but I don't remember any details, save one: if you have the cover off and are messing with the drive, that 110V PS will bite you if you get your fingers in the wrong place!

 

-Larry

[Mclaneinc]

Wasn't that used on the Amstrad?

 

The 3" drive that is...Pretty sure it was

Edited December 27, 2016 by Mclaneinc

[Ely]

Yeah in the CPC and PCW ranges. And also in the Speccy +3.

[Mclaneinc]

Yeah in the CPC and PCW ranges. And also in the Speccy +3.

 

Ta, I remember how odd a choice it was at the time...Mind you with Microtapes also out around then any storage was a bit odd

[+bf2k+]

I had the Amdek 3" Dual Drive for Atari 8-bits. You could also hang additional external drives on it. I had a Teac 51/4 quad density drive on mine.

 

The 3" disks were very hard to find even back in the mid-80's.

[tschak909]

Yes, there was a 3" drive and disk. It was developed and manufactured by Hitachi. Amdek was one of the few OEMs. It showed up as a product for multiple computer systems, and in reality was a fairly standard Shugart compatible connection, connected to a particular host adaptor, depending on platform (I saw this drive for Atari, Apple, and TRS-80 machines).

 

The drive was also OEMed by a number of manufacturers as a low cost drive option for e.g. the Tatung Einstein, and Amstrad CPC machines, but by 1987 the drive had all but disappeared...

 

Other interesting floppy form factor curios:

 

The Dysan 3.25" micro floppy, which was championed by Shugart, Dysan, and a few other drive manufacturers, who were trying to come up with a cheaper alternative to the Sony 3.5" mechanism. Some drives made it to limited production, and were seen to be used in some very low cost drive implementations such as the ADAM Memory Drive unit, but the drives never made it to full production. Insanely rare.

 

The Mitsumi Quik-Disk, a 2.8" disk with a single spiral track. This was a dirt cheap micro-floppy alternative that DID exist, and had some notable customers, such as Nintendo, for their Famicom Disk System, AKAI for their S612, S700 and X7000 samplers, and Smith-Corona for their word processors. The disk encoded its data onto a single spiral track, that, while sector accessible, had a bit of lag due to having to traverse the spiral linearly to find the appropriate sector.

 

There also was a very rare form of the sony microfloppy called the 2" floppy. It has very similar mechanical design to the 3.5" floppy, but is noticeably smaller. It was originally designed for digital cameras (which it did see some very early use there, albeit in a slightly cost reduced form, the earliest Mavica units used them.), and only saw an outing for one laptop, the Zenith MiniSport...

 

...anyway.

[walter_J64bit]

How much room do you get with 3" disk? I take that you have to use Mydos or SpartaDOS.

[Tezz]

I have a Spectrum+3 with internal 3" drive. A couple of years ago I bought three external Amstrad FD-1 disk drives from a guy which all worked fine after cleaning the heads and replacing the old drive belts. I wanted to pick one up because it's possible to connect an FD-1 drive to an old pc motherboard as an IDE device. After disconnecting the internal power connector and choosing 5 1/4" drive in the BIOS, you can then use it to read and write disk images from the PC. I created some compacted games menu disks for fun via emulation and copied them back to real 3" disks with a slightly extended format.

[Omega-TI]

A 3" floppy? Don't they have pills for that?

[+bf2k+]

I am pretty sure the Amdek supported 256 bytes/sector so the disks were formatted to 180k. I used both MyDOS and Sparta 3.2d.

[Mclaneinc]

A 3" floppy? Don't they have pills for that?

 

No, they only worry when its a 6" floppy...

[fujidude]

A 3" floppy? Don't they have pills for that?

 

Yes; they're blue I think.