CrossDOS is a file system handler for accessing

FAT In nutrition science, nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such chemical compound, compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food. The term often refers specif ...

formatted media on

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

computers. It was bundled with

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

2.1 and later. Its function was to allow working with disks formatted for PCs and

Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...

s (and others). In the 1990s it became a commonly used method of file exchange between Amiga systems and other platforms. CrossDOS supported both double density (720 KB) and high density (1.44 MB)

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

s on compatible disk drives. As with

AmigaDOS AmigaDOS is the disk operating system of the AmigaOS, which includes file systems, file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface, and file Redirection (computing), redirection. In AmigaOS 1.x, AmigaDOS is based on a TRIPOS port by ...

disk handling, it allowed automatic disk-change detection for FAT formatted floppy disks. The file system was also used with

hard disk A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

s and other media for which CrossDOS provided hard disk configuration software. However, the versions of CrossDOS bundled with AmigaOS did not support long filenames, an extension to FAT that was introduced with

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

History

CrossDOS was originally developed as a stand-alone commercial product by Consultron, which was available for AmigaOS 1.2 and 1.3. In 1992 Commodore included a version of CrossDOS with AmigaOS 2.1 (and with later versions), so that users could work with PC formatted disks. In fact, the bundled version will also work with version 2.0 of AmigaOS. The bundled CrossDOS replaced an obscure tool in earlier versions of AmigaOS that could access FAT formatted disks on a secondary floppy disk drive only (this tool was not a complete file system but a user program to read files from a FAT formatted disk). Development of CrossDOS continued after being bundled with the OS. CrossDOS 7 was the last version released and included support for long filenames and other features not available in the bundled version.

References

AmigaOS Amiga software Disk file systems {{compu-storage-stub

History

See also

References