Physically the controller was much smaller than the PC controller, it was software which significantly increased its flexibility.Ī 1GHz Android Phone has over 100 times the performance of an Amiga, but I doubt it has more than 10 times the perceived performance. The hardware equivalent of less than a 100 lines of code. Raw data was captured from the drive, stored in memory using DMA and then processed with the help of the Blitter. The Amiga 880 Kbyte floppy drive was identical to the 720 Kbyte pc drive (raw storage about 1 Mbyte).

While there is an official format spec for the Amiga floppies, many games use more exotic systems to pack more data and the only way to truly make a copy of Amiga floppies is to read the entire track which a computer that has a regular controller will not let you do.

The Amiga was very good machine to copy Atari ST protected floppies back in the day :) The Amiga can also not write a sector on a track, but needs to write the entire track back. On the Amiga, there is not such thing: the encoding / decoding of the track is done by the CPU and the blitter (to speed up bit operations) and the format itself is completely open. The floppy controller hides all of this from you and presents you a floppy where tracks are nicely partitioned in sectors, etc. In a typical format (MFM), roughly 50% of the magnetic surface on a track is used for this purpose. The problem is that the read head will be less sensitive to a change if it exposed to a magnetic field that has been steady for this reason, data bits are interleaved with synchronization marks whose only role is to reverse the flux to prevent this from happening. The Amiga uses a standard floppy drive, but doesn't use a standard controller.ĭata on a magnetic media is essentially stored as flux changes over time where the controller will detect if the magnetic flux has changed over a certain period of time to make it a 0 or a 1.

Amiga formatted 880k floppy disks