Changes
My comments - Jonathanen: When John King has told me about CF-2DD discs for the first time after I've purchased one of them (with the [[Media:CF2DD Blue.jpg|Blue label]]) back in Friday 2nd April 2004 as a souvenir as well purchasing other Amstrad CPC / PCW stuff from him (I was his regular customer, always calling him to reserve the items for me to collect after I've checked out his web site and then I travel 2 - 3 hrs by train, checking / testing out the merchandise at his house when I got there, collect, paid him by cash and then make another 2 - 3 hrs back on my way home, I didn't care how far he lives or how heavy the items that I'm carrying on my way back, as long I got the items that I always wanted), I thought he was making it up, until when I got home and decided to tested out his own theory, it turns out that he is right along and it works perfectly. Then, I've tried the reverse order using any standard CF-2 discs as CF-2DD discs, and it turns out that I'm right as well, as it works perfectly - check out my [http://www.jonathanen.com/pages/Help/badsector.html "Re-using 3 Inch Floppy Discs with Bad Sectors"] link to see what I mean.
== 3 Inch Discs Comments from MacDeath ==
Those 3" floppies were known to be in chronic shortage... and for being far more expensive than other formats due to all the mechanical parts in them. In France they would sometimes cost about 4x or 5x times more than 5"1/4 or 3"1/2 (20-30 francs per piece instead of 5-10 francs for other formats, roughly)... They were supposed to have DD or HD version, but mostly only some PCW would use double sided disk drives with special format not quite compatible with simple sided disk drives.
That the PCW, a professional computer, would use those too in large number would create the shortage, as companies wouldn't mind bying bulk stocks of such floppies. The snoty CPC gaming user (or Speccy+3) would really have to think twice at what content he would put on those. Also the price of the disks would have impact on game devs and producers, as they would rarely aim at games using one whole or multiple floppies (6128 specific large games) because this could mean less profit, longer development time and only 6128 configs being able to launch games, the few amount of money spent on the floppies would quite render the game less profitable than small Tape oriented games (464 and 664 configs) that could be packed on one disk compilations. 16bit games would be sold at bigger price and would use far less expensive floppies anyway, so a game on 3-5 floppies would cost as much as a game on CPC on a full used disk in raw floppy material.
A 3" disk could be somewhat 360ko in total, basically the same as a quite basic 5"1/4DD, except that you would have to flip side on a CPC. quite rapidly, the 3"1/2 went for DD in 720ko or HD in 1.44mo at quite lesser price per disk (the disk drive could be quite expensive on the other hand) which was more suitable for 16bit computers (those would at minimum sport 512ko of RAM most of time passed the Atari STfm release / after 1986).
Some specific moded disk drives could perform special formats that were actually used as copy protection for some games, the most (only?) known exemple being Defender of the Crown on CPC. The french developper for the CPC version [[Brice Rive]] developped this specific method and went on to become UBIsoft copy protection specialist. He produced/coded [[Defender of the Crown]], but also E.X.I.T and copy protection for various UBIsoft prods on CPC.
The story of this copy protection scheme was explained at CPCrulez french forum. The method consisted of moding some specific 3" floppy disk drives models so they could format the 3" floppies in something like 200ko per sides... Normal unmodified disk drives wouldn't be able to format disk the same way so the datas would need more floppies to be spread on and the copie, while still possible, would ask for many more disk switch and would render the game experience far less enjoyable. Cracked version of Defender of the Crown using 3 sides instead of only 2.
The situation with this 3" format was a dead end. Amstrad went for cheap arrangement in production and adventageous contract so they wouldn't upgrade to DD/HD (720ko per disk) because the disk drives would be too expensive, hence no proper use in larger RAM configuration would be viable, both in PCW or CPC (or speccy+3). So those 8 bit computers couldn't really benefit from upgraded games comparable to 16bit machines in content, and so on.
Else it was a capable format, with somewhat robust floppies in elegant compact casings and quite fast disk access as well. CPC6128 was a pleasure to have. And by the way modern solution such as 3"1/2 disk drives or HxC floppy emulators are easily retro-fitable today.
The nostalgia value from those 3 inchers is always touching anyway.
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