Includes info published in the Nov. 1999 issue of EMB magazine. Certain machine disk formats do not use standard DOS formatting. Instead they employ some other formatting scheme. Contributions sorely needed to complete this section.
Many commercial programs can read and write a variety of machine disk formats.
Most commonly, Melco .ESP and Tajima .DST are supported. Some commercial programs can also read and write file formats which are native to other software packages. Older versions of some software may not be able to open files created by a newer version of the same program even though the file extentions are the same as used by the older version. Generally, the newer software can read designs created with the older version. Such conversions tend be imperfect, requring adjustment of shape and control parameters.