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so whats the history/story behind 40k intro compos on Amiga? was it an technical issue or was it just someone who randomly selected 40k? since 64k intros on PC was and still is so common i just started to wonder why 40k and 64k got separate competitions.
(i know this might be a stupid question if there is no real answer for this, but it came up when someone on a channel was mentioning 40k intros for Amiga, and I didnt get an answer why it was so). I did not own an Amiga and I know too little about the technical specifications to have any ideas of why there got two separate competitions. all comments are welcome.

Well, coming from the Amiga scene we always wondered why the PC guys needed 64kb where we were happy with 40k... But other than that, I dunno..

bartman: aha ;)

I was always led to believe the 40k size has something to do with how the Amiga formats floppy disks. But this could be total bullshit.

thom: i thought so to.
maybe someone can confirm if it was or not :P

I tried to find the reason in Freax but there doesn't appear to be any specific.
All it says is that the first party to have 40k intro was The Party 92, that at some compos later the limit was 128k or 64k like the PC, but the 40k was considered a standard. Nah,. it doesn't really say..

This is just surmising on my part, but the Amiga formated double-sided disks with 80 "cyclinders" (re: tracks) and 11 sectors per side. Assuming each sector contained 512 bytes of data, a complete sector on one side would yield 40960 bytes, or 40k exactly.

But then again, that could just be a coincidence...

thom: doesn't make sense to me - I think the Amigas didn't have inter-sector gaps, it just read the entire track in one go. If you're right on the 11 sectors per side thing (and I think you are) that means one pass would be 5632 bytes, followed by another 5632 bytes, followed by a head seek, followed by 5632 bytes etc... None of which add up to 40960 bytes.

Or have I just gone insane?

All I know for sure is the Amiga floppy drive was pretty flexible in terms of how it could read disks. And if it were possible to read an entire "geometrical sector" in one go, then it's pretty easy to get a perfect 40960 bytes.

But I don't really know. Again, just speculation on my part.

lame.