12-29-2013, 10:48 PM
I'd have figured you could do 2 or 3 generations of copies before it had troubles loading. AmigaDOS disks probably more. Otherwise, not too surprising.
You're basically transferring data back and forth between digital and analog domain. Floppy disks and drives are imperfect. Even though you tell it to write a flux transition 4.00us from the last one, it may not come out exactly like that as the speed of the drive isn't exactly 300RPM all the time, among other factors. So the next time you sample that flux transition timing, it likely won't read back as 4.00us. The more you repeat the process, the greater the drift becomes.
Some of this can be corrected for with write pre-compensation. You could even get fancy and write the track to disk, read it back, compare timing differences, adjust accordingly, write back again.
Or you can just write all copies from the same source image file, since it will never change
You're basically transferring data back and forth between digital and analog domain. Floppy disks and drives are imperfect. Even though you tell it to write a flux transition 4.00us from the last one, it may not come out exactly like that as the speed of the drive isn't exactly 300RPM all the time, among other factors. So the next time you sample that flux transition timing, it likely won't read back as 4.00us. The more you repeat the process, the greater the drift becomes.
Some of this can be corrected for with write pre-compensation. You could even get fancy and write the track to disk, read it back, compare timing differences, adjust accordingly, write back again.
Or you can just write all copies from the same source image file, since it will never change