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Amiga emulators and AmigaOS (with third-party software) can use these files as if they were virtual floppy disks. Unlimited virtual floppies could be created on modern Amigas, although WinUAE on a real PC can handle only four at a time, the maximum number of floppy drives that the Amiga hardware could have connected at any one time.
As the majority floppy-disks shipped by software-companies or as magazine-coverdisks still used this DOS type (which would boot on pre-2.x machines like the Amiga 500), this enabled users with existing OFS-formatted drives, that all older OFS-based disks could still be read afterwards, once they had installed FFS to the RDB of their start-disk.
The Amiga 500, also known as the A500, was the first popular version of the Amiga home computer, "redefining the home computer market and making so-called luxury features such as multitasking and colour a standard long before Microsoft or Apple sold these to the masses."
Hard-drive equipped versions were labeled "A2500HD" Amiga 1500: 1990–1991 68000 1 MB 1.3 3.9 / 3.2 UK only, variant of A2000 with two floppy drives and no HDD. This version originated with CBM UK Marketing who found it necessary to distinguish the floppy-only version from the A2000 with the general public. Amiga CDTV: 1991–1992 68000 1 MB 1.3
The Amiga's floppy disk drive allowed 880 kilobytes on a single disk, comparable to the RAM of most Amigas (512 kilobytes to 1 megabyte). To increase capacity, Amiga used data compression. The disk drive had a slow transfer rate, such that using processor-based decompression could actually reduce loading times versus loading uncompressed data.
On the Amiga, the Old File System was the filesystem for AmigaOS before the Amiga Fast File System. Even though it used 512-byte blocks, it reserved the first small portion of each block for metadata, leaving an actual data block capacity of 488 bytes per block. It wasn't very suitable for anything except floppy disks, and it was soon replaced.
The entire Workbench operating system consisted of three floppy disks: Kickstart, Workbench and ABasic by MetaComCo. The Amiga 1000 needed a Kickstart disk to be inserted into floppy drive to boot up. An image of a simple illustration of a hand on a white screen, holding a blue Kickstart floppy, invited the user to perform this operation.
Most Amiga programs were distributed on double-density floppy disks. There are also 3.5-inch high-density floppy disks, which hold up to 1.76 MB of data, but these are uncommon. The Amiga also had 5.25-inch double-density disks. The WinUAE Amiga emulator supports all three disk formats, but 3.5-inch double-density is the most common.