Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!philmtl!philabs!ttidca!woodside
From: woodside@ttidca.TTI.COM (George Woodside)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Problems with Turtle & newest version of DCFormat ...
Message-ID: <4659@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Date: 29 Jun 89 11:28:46 GMT
References: <8906261014.AA28016@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: woodside@ttidcb.tti.com (George Woodside)
Organization: Citicorp/TTI, Santa Monica
Lines: 35

In article <8906261014.AA28016@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> VBRANDT@DBNUAMA1.BITNET writes:
...[edited]
>   What had happened?? Well, I use 82 track 10 sector 'twister' disks. Turtle
>provides a self-adjusting RAM disk, so it used to work fine. BUT: The current
>DCFormat creates disks with 3 sectors per FAT, whereas the Turtle RAM disk 
>only works with 5 sectors/track!  So watch out, and don't get trapped like me.
>
>   Of course I had long thrown away all earlier versions of DCFormat, and I do
>like 3 sector FATs better (after all, it's an extra 2k per disk).
>
>   Now the real purpose of this mailing:  George, if you read this, have you
>dealt with that problem. If not, are you going to?  :-)  There's at least one
>Turtle fan waiting (namely me :-).

Wonderful. I needed a few new headaches.

Updating Turtle's archive handling to be compatible with both the current
TOS (1.2, backwards and somewhat unreliable archive bit) and the new TOS 1.4
(normal, and apparently reliable archive bit) is on my task list.

Changing a disk configuration on the fly is a bit more of a problem. Turtle 
writes the disk image in the RAMdisk, then expects the floppy to match it.
Changing the configuration after the RAMdisk is filled is not possible (well,
not practical). The only other options are to scan the output floppy disks
before writing to the RAMdisk (which is very contrary to the way the program
works now), or add yet another setup option.

I'll have to kick this around a bit. I'm a bit on the busy side at the
moment (so what's new?), so it will be a while before I can get time to
act on the issue.


-- 
*George R. Woodside - Citicorp/TTI - Santa Monica, CA 
*Path:       ..!{philabs|csun|psivax}!ttidca!woodside