Comment by hinkley
1 month ago
There was a hacked driver you could get that would tighten up the tolerances of the stepper motor and get from 1.5 to 1.9 MB of data onto a single floppy, but sliding the tracks closer together.
There was I believe at some point a game that shipped 1.5MB disks as a copy protection mechanism. But if you had this tool you could copy them anyway.
Are you referring to 2M/2MGUI? That didn't change the track spacing (which is fixed) but used bigger sector sizes (similar to how HDDs went from 512B to 4K physical sectors):
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how...
(Big fuckings to Wikipedia for erasing history, and kudos to archive.org for preserving it: https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipe... )
No they definitely did more tracks, but it seems to be a smaller multiplier than I recalled.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...
2-5% more tracks, 12.5% more sectors.
The track spacing didn't change, but yes, many if not all floppy drives could step the head slightly past the officially supported number of tracks.