Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!unido!fbihh!schmidt
From: schmidt@fbihh.UUCP (Jens Schmidt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Setting disk drive seek rate to 2ms
Summary: New XBIOS function 41 in TOS 1.4
Message-ID: <258@fbihh.UUCP>
Date: 5 May 89 14:56:06 GMT
References: <1454@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu>
Organization: University of Hamburg, FB Informatik, W-Germany
Lines: 23

In article <1454@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu>, sajima@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu (Takahiro Sajima) writes:
> Does anyone out there in Netland know how I can set my drive seek rate
> to 2ms and turn the write verify off?  I used to use a program called
> Schizo (1.3) ... does not work with TOS 1.4 ...
For write verification off, see the system variables in the dev. docs. For the
steprate, I found a new XBIOS function no. 41 in TOS 1.4 that Atari never
documented (at least I never saw anything in the release notes 8-).

C use:
#define Steprate(drive,rate)  XBIOS(41,drive,rate)

Pascal use:
FUNCTION steprate (drive, rate: INTEGER): INTEGER; XBIOS (41);

All parameters are 16 bits, drive is either 0 or 1 for drive A: or B:, rate
is 0 (6ms), 1 (12ms), 2 (2ms), or 3 (3ms). The returned value is the previous
setting. Like all over XBIOS, -1 for drive just returns the old value without
changing anything.

A warning to all: verification is not there for itself, even high quality
disks sometimes fail! I'd switch it off only for disks so worthless that I
don't bother to use them. Using 2ms with drives that can't handle that causes
a SLOWDOWN because of retries.