Those Sloppy These Floppy Disc Drives are not the original Amstrad standard.
Yet they were far more cheap cheaper and are nowadays easier to use.
Especially the 3½" (3"1/2 ?) as those these disk are still availlable in some retailers. You can also easily find such drives in any garbage if you properly scavenge old rusty computers.
Those Disk size These Disks couldn't be side switched manually.The older models where using used only one side (360 Ko ?Kb)By double Double side (DD) or even High Density where were available.
==Formats ==
== A clever choice ==
A great advantage at the time (in the 80's) was to get access to CP/M sofware library, as most of those were on such Floppy DiscDisks.
Also, those Floppy Discs Disks were far cheaper than the exotic 3", but... few CPC users actually got own such drives.
Mostly professionnal users...The common snotling Gamer couldn't even dream of this (nor even knew it possible)... until nowadays.
Many Modern CPC users replace their old 3" by with an external 3"1/2, often adding a Disk drive A-B / B-A switcher (allowing to use the use of an external disk Drive as if it were the internal one = Drive A) and/or a side switcher to allow to the use a 3"1/2 disk like a 3" disk... switching manually the sides as needed by good old 3" disk drives (yet a decent sofware can do it).
The side switcher and A-B drive's switchers are needed only if you use old softwaressoftware, as most of them couldn't really figure they were loaded from B drivers, or has had no such feature as double sided drives.
They were designed for good old 3" drive so the 720Ko 720Kb DD extgernal external 3"1/2 is not implemented.
But modern softwares software designers can allow this fairly more easily.
Orion Prime use uses the Double sides side feature, enabling a simple 720Ko disc 720Kb disk with no manual side switches.
Rick Dangerous 128+ (1.1 addon) seems to allow the game to be loaded from the B drive.
It is up to the CPC-scene to design their softwares to include those options, allowing more un-modded drives to be simply used as external B drives with no need to add extra buttons and cable montages assemblies on the Amstrad.
As modifying all the software library of the good gay old time times seems impractical, yet modern era software have to use this.
== Softwares released on 3"1/2 disk==
*[[Orion Prime]]
This pure awsomness awsomeness even use uses a full DD disk's 80 tracks with more than 700Ko 700Kb of Data, yet but you have to get have a proper DD disk Drivedrive, as some older models may lack this feature...