Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!eecg.toronto.edu!leblanc From: leblanc@eecg.toronto.edu (Marcel LeBlanc) Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm Subject: Re: Fastload & download Summary: Speed-up is not just limited by transfer speed Message-ID: <1990Mar21.150019.16076@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> Date: 21 Mar 90 20:00:19 GMT References: <26428@siemens.siemens.com> <6672@ncar.ucar.edu> <13473.26068f64@max.u.washington.edu> Organization: EECG, University of Toronto Lines: 45 In article <13473.26068f64@max.u.washington.edu> scott@max.u.washington.edu writes: >In article <6672@ncar.ucar.edu>, baseball@bierstadt.scd.ucar.edu (Gregg Walters) writes: >> About 1/3 of my software won't >> load and/or run with Fastload. I don't believe that there is a universal >> solution to the slow loading problem of the 1541. > >Ahh, but there is a solution...and it is called "JiffyDOS" by the >people of Creative Micro Design. Unlike other product this is an actual >chip replace (which can be done very easily) for the disk drive (whatever >it might be 1541, 1571, 1581, etc) and for the C64 or C128 that accesses it. >With JiffyDOS installed disk access overall (according to >the ad) is 15 times faster. ... To put it politely, this claim is extremely EXAGGERATED. I suspect that they may be talking about the actual transfer rate speedup, but this is misleading since the transfer rate over the serial bus is only one of many factors that affect the speedup that the user sees. For any speedup device, the easiest types of transfers to speed-up are large block transfers. For the C64, the only large block transfers that the kernal routines do are LOADs and SAVEs. As JiffyDos and others have shown, it is indeed possible to speed-up other disk accesses, but these are never as fast as the speed-ups possible for LOADs and SAVEs. I seem to remember that if you re-save files under the JiffyDos format (which is just a tighter interleave than the 1541 normally uses), you can get into the double digits in speed-up (i.e. > 10 times), but I've never been able to get 15 times speed-up. However, if you take any plain old ordinary 1541 disk, and try to load it in with JiffyDos, you will only get a 5 times speed-up! This is still respectable, but it's only as fast as archaic FastLoad. JiffyDos is a reasonably good product, but don't expect miracles. The biggest complaint I have about JiffyDos is their consistently misleading ads. >For an ad of this product see recent issue of a commodore magainze. > >Sincerely, >Scott K. Stephen Yeah, and while you're at it, look at the other ads too. Marcel A. LeBlanc | University of Toronto -- Toronto, Canada "leblanc@eecg.toronto.edu" | and: LMS Technologies Ltd, Fredericton, NB, Canada ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UUCP: uunet!utai!eecg!leblanc BITNET: leblanc@eecg.utoronto[.ca]