Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ihu1h!ihnp4!ihlpe!kimes
From: kimes@ihlpe.ATT.COM (Kit Kimes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: XF551 Drive <> Flight Sim II incompatible
Message-ID: <3610@ihlpe.ATT.COM>
Date: 7 Oct 88 17:34:34 GMT
References: <12295@eecae.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 28

> 
>  
> A word of warning to you folks considering a purchase of the XF551 and
> or Flight Simulator II from Sublogic. These two products are NOT 
> compatible. I have tried multiple copies of Flight Sim II (fortunately,
> friends have it too) and my XF551 simply wont boot them. It's not just
> a matter of booting the disks. Switching back to my 810 drive, they (of
> course) work just fine.
>  
> It's my impression that this has something to do with a protection scheme on
> the disk. Being that my 810 has trouble reading the high tracks on diskettes
> (which is why I wanted a decent drive in the first place) I _need_ to be able
> to use my good drive.
> 
The September issue of Current Notes (the Washington area user group 
magazine/newsletter) had a review of the XF551 by Curt Sandler.  He had
the same problem with FS II that Terry did.  It turns out that Atari
set the disk drive speed on the XF551 at 300 rpm instead of the old 288
rpm speed.  This is ok for most software, but FS II is very sensitive
to drive speed.  This may be part of their protection scheme.  They didn't
offer any solution, but it would seem to me that the speed could be
changed to 288 rpm.  With this information, maybe you could experiment
some and report back to the net.


					Kit Kimes  
					AT&T--Bell Laboratories
					...att!ihlpe!kimes