Nice site and PDF intro!
RalfR wrote:I haven't understood, why TT had not put the QXL.WIN container onto Atari, it is a nearly crash-proof way to store files.
Actually Tony Tebby
did bring nicely working QLWA to Atari formatted harddisks! But he did that for Q40/Q60 - where there was not so much technical reason to use the Atari partition scheme. My guess is that Tony Tebby was just more familiar with Atari, so he did not use the PC partition scheme. But I don't actually know.
The traditional "QXL.WIN" usage was as normal, possibly fragmented files on a host PC for emulators. This differs in an important aspect from the native QLWA usage on Q40/Q60 (on Atari scheme harddisk) and later on Q68 (container on FAT32). The native usage requires all sectors in continuous, consecutive order. Confusing "QXL.WIN" with native QLWA is very dangerous - if the requirement is ignored, data corruption is inevitable! People are not used to the native QLWA requirement from the traditional "QXL.WIN" files for emulators, so there is considerable risk that mediums are interchanged without paying attention.
I hoped to bring a little awareness to this issue by trying to establish a different naming for native QLWA, if used in container files. So on the Q68, I proposed a different default name and avoid "QXL.WIN". But when Wolfgang ported the Q68 driver to QL-SD, he didn't see the importance, and the name "QXL.WIN" eventually made it into the QL-SD ROMs sold by Marcel. Now we have easy confusion between traditional "QXL.WIN" files and unfragmented QLWA containers.