About Plus D real floppy disk support

Spectaculator can read, write and format real 3½" floppy disks in standard G+DOS (Plus D and DISCiPLE) and Uni-DOS formats. The reading and writing of copy-protected disks is not supported (but may work depending on the protection itself).

To use real floppy disks, you must first enable real floppy disk support for drive D1, D2 or both.

Notes on using real Plus D floppy disks

USB floppy disk drives

USB floppy disk drives are not capable of reading and writing Plus D formatted disks. Your PC needs to have a standard floppy disk controller on the motherboard and a 3½" 80 track, double-sided floppy disk drive installed.

Using high density (2DHD) floppy disks

Although high density disks work fine on a real Plus D, you may find you cannot read these disks on your PC (it depends on the type of floppy disk drive used in your PC).

To fix this, cover the density select hole (opposite the write protect hole) with a piece of tape.

Formatting disks

Although you can use the G+DOS and Uni-DOS FORMAT commands, it is faster to use the Format toolbar button.

Write protect status

When a virtual disk drive (D1 or D2) is connected to a real floppy disk drive, the floppy disk itself determines the write protect status. In this case, the write protect lock in the disk window will be grayed out.

Track caching

When reading and writing real floppy disks, Spectaculator will agressively cache disk tracks to improve performance. You will notice, for example, that a disk catalogue will take longer the first time it is displayed for a particular disk.

When writing to disk, Spectaculator flushes the write cache after a second of inactivity. You should not eject the disk until this has happened. In practice, this just means waiting until the drive light has gone out for a second or two before pressing the eject button.

If a write fault occurs during flushing of the write cache, a message bubble will warn you that you should resave your files to a different disk.