Comment by snvzz
2 days ago
For those wondering what AmigaOS looks like, it's beautiful[0].
>CrossDOS was a combination of mfm.device (asking the disk hardware to do funky things) as well as CrossDOSFileSystem (FAT12 filesystem handler).
The "disk hardware" is a pretty dull DAC/ADC. The track format is different in Amiga and IBM PC floppies, but from the perspective of the Amiga hardware it is identical, as it does not deal with that.
The encoding/decoding is always done in software, and mfm.device just implements the IBM PC track format.
These days CrossDOSFileSystem also supports fat32, long filenames and even can parse MBR partition tables if you want to mount something else than the first partition. :-)
mfm.device is naturally not needed or used if you aren't using floppy disk. The filesystem handler uses whatever storage driver your mass storage is connected to if the mass storage is not accessed at a low level.