Author Topic: Any need to support FAT16 these days  (Read 1814 times)

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Offline AlfBazTopic starter

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Any need to support FAT16 these days
« on: March 31, 2015, 12:27:37 am »
I'm revisiting some FAT code that I wrote several years ago and was considering getting rid of FAT16 support.

I was considering "messing" up the code with a bunch of conditional defines but my thinking is there's probably not much call for FAT16 these days especially considering the difficulty in obtaining any storage media less than 1GB in size.

Any thoughts?
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Any need to support FAT16 these days
« Reply #1 on: March 31, 2015, 01:25:19 am »
There is very little business case for support of this protocol now, but the dropping of support for older protocols is an irritation for me and anyone else who isn't totally in favor of our throwaway society. 

Anything new I have will not be FAT16, but I still have floppy disc drives with old information and data stored on them.  A USB floppy drive keeps them accessible on relatively current machinery.  Sure, I could take a few days and copy them off onto some new media.    This is just one example, there are many others where the obsolete hardware found in closets, surplus stores and waste bins still has value to someone.

While it isn't FAT related, a similar example is the ink jet printer I use at home, which was a fairly high end small business all in one model when new.  It still functions perfectly, with multiple paper trays, duplex printing, multi-sheet scanning etc.  In the Windows environment the currently available drivers only support relatively simple printing tasks.  Scanning is virtually impossible.  Under Linux I can get better support, but nothing like the features that came with the drivers that worked under Windows XP.
 


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