Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!godzilla.eecg.toronto.edu!leblanc From: leblanc@eecg.toronto.edu (Marcel LeBlanc) Subject: Re: turbodisk and IEEE Message-ID: <89Feb14.155723est.2717@godzilla.eecg.toronto.edu> Summary: Non-standard formats can give much better speed WITH 1541 Keywords: turbo, non-standard sectors Organization: EECG, University of Toronto References: <8902130828.AA09474@MATH.Tau.Ac.IL> Date: Tue, 14 Feb 89 13:45:50 EST In article <8902130828.AA09474@MATH.Tau.Ac.IL> writes: >There has been lately a talk about IEEE drives, and their owner's dislike >of turbo disk programs. > >Well, I have written a turbo program for 8050/8250/SFD1001. It uses all 3 >processors ( 2 in the drive, 1 in the C64 ) so it can easily read a full >track at a time with zero interleave. The program reads the disk using a >nonstandard file format ( that coexist on the same disk with normal PRG/SEQ >file ) that uses 256 data bytes per block and continous block allocation on >the disk. I have a special copy program that prepares such disks. The program >runs on special IEEE cards manufactured by the company on which I work. (these >are actually network cards. up to 20 C64's can share the same IEEE drvice ). >Speed is much faster than anything possible with any C64.. I think it's faster ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ not true! >than the C128 burst mode. I also have a C128 version of the program. It should be faster than the C128 burst mode, because of the greatly reduced overhead required in decoding non-standard sectors! This isn't something unique to IEEE drives, of course. The _STANDARD_ 1541 fast loader on Super Snapshot V4 is FASTER than a 1571/C128 in burst mode (12-15x speedup), and about the same speed as a 1581/C128 in burst mode. Supplied on the utility disk, is a translator program which converts to Turbo 25 format. This is a non-standard format such as the one you described. As the name implies, it achieves 20-25x times speedup over standard 1541. This is for the C64, and is MUCH faster that C128 burst load. Marcel A. LeBlanc | University of Toronto -- Toronto, Canada leblanc@eecg.toronto.edu | also: LMS Technologies Ltd, Fredericton, NB, Canada ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UUCP: uunet!utai!eecg!leblanc BITNET: leblanc@eecg.utoronto (may work) ARPA: leblanc%eecg.toronto.edu@relay.cs.net CDNNET: <...>.toronto.cdn