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SpartaDOS X 4.49 (release version)


drac030

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On 8/20/2020 at 5:33 PM, drac030 said:

@Nezgar and @Jacques thank you very much. I will give it a shot today's evening.

 

The driver in its current state is here: http://sdx.atari8.info/sdx_files/test/topdrv.sys

 

It for now allows to define just one drive as Top Drive 1050, but it is no problem to make it accept more, if there is need.

You're welcome, I'm happy to assist and test.

Finally I've found time to do so and can report following:

 

1) highspeed reading works

2) highspeed writing works (tested only creating directory)

3) FORMAT with SDX internal tool works (DD 180KB, SDX format) - at first had an error with apparently damaged diskette.

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Meanwhile I've done two RWTEST runs on same Turbo 1050 disk drive and same disk:

 

1) TOPDRV.SYS - ATARI OS

 

20200823_175421.thumb.jpg.1a063440b24e2bb08df23241de0fb81e.jpg

 

2) QMEG built-in UltraSpeed (F) used under SDX via SIO.SYS /A

 

20200823_175647.thumb.jpg.4f927988518a677d2190d394ce1fd269.jpg

 

It's great with TOPDRV.SYS to have standalone driver now, I'm just wondering, why QMEG's UltraSpeed is even slightly quicker, while 1050 Turbo / Top Drive theoretically can run at 68,2 kbps and UltraSpeed at 57,6 kbps (3xSIO)? ;)

 

Edited by Jacques
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@lemiel Yes, of course.

 

@Jacques It is probably the sector interleave which is decisive here, that is why there is virtually no difference. The tiny difference you are observing is probably due to a 1 extra VBL tick which occurs due to extra time consumed on transfer setup in Atari OS routines which QMEG possibly saves or something like that.

Edited by drac030
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46 minutes ago, lemiel said:

@Jacques how it could be UltraSpeed in Turbo only drive? It is also Turbo. Bad name. Only 3 bytes per second faster QMEG in reading... Not possible with bigger difference between 09 and 06 POKEY divisor. 

 

Errrmmm,

 

as far as I know QMEG has built-in drivers for Speedy 1050 (ultraspeed), Happy 1050 (warp+ultraspeed), US-Doubler (ultraspeed), Turbo 1050 (turbospeed) and XF551 (XF highspeed). So whenever QMEG sees a Turbo 1050 it uses turbospeed and NOT ultraspeed...

 

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10 hours ago, lemiel said:

@Jacques how it could be UltraSpeed in Turbo only drive? It is also Turbo. Bad name. Only 3 bytes per second faster QMEG in reading... Not possible with bigger difference between 09 and 06 POKEY divisor. 

Maybe there could be an option to change POKEY divisor by TOPDRV.SYS driver in similiar way, original 1050 Turbo  / Top Drive does?
I just wonder if it's possible to extract those 68,2 kbps under SDX...

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8 hours ago, Jacques said:

Maybe there could be an option to change POKEY divisor by TOPDRV.SYS driver in similiar way, original 1050 Turbo  / Top Drive does?
I just wonder if it's possible to extract those 68,2 kbps under SDX...

What you are seeing *IS* 68.2kbps - the sectors are indeed transferring at this speed, but without track buffering there is a lot of latency between requesting each sector, the drive reading it from the disk, and the drive transmitting it. This loses more than half the "theoretical" max in rwtest.

 

Interestingly, the interleave formatted by Turbo 1050 can also be read fullspeed by a usdoubler at 54Kbps, slightly faster than the "ultraspeed" interleave commonly laid down by spartados formatters.

 

The very small difference seen here between the two drivers could just be within the random variance you may see with multiple runs, or as simple as RPM variance with the drive warming up and spinning a little faster...

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Thank you. The disk I was doing RWTEST on was formatted under TOPDRV.SYS using SDX's format program. How to format it to get most out of it without buffering, then?

Normally on Turbo 1050 / TOP DRIVE re-reading other drives' disks and writing given disk-side again dramatically increases reading-speed.

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@Jacques Every floppy drive during formatting a disk puts the physical sectors on every track in a characteristic order (known as "interleave" or "sector skew") which should be (and most often is) optimal for the bitrate and rotational speed the drive is using. This is the factor which is decisive when comes to reading/writing efficiency. Inserting a disk with wrong interleave usually causes dramatical speed decrease (or no improvement when comparing to 19200 bps).

 

Also, in most drives the interleave is fixed by the firmware and cannot be changed. Some drives support the US Doubler format command which allows to tune the interleave, others (as Indus/LDW/CA, TOMS) are programmable, so in theory one could also format a disk on them with custom interleave. Most drives, though, simply use the optimal interleave for the selected formatting mode.

 

http://atariki.krap.pl/index.php/Przeplot

 

I hope that this is what you wanted to know :)

Edited by drac030
typos
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  • 3 months later...
  • 1 month later...

For the brave souls, who fear nothing and like to be at the cutting edge:

 

SpartaDOS X 4.49e has been just uploaded to the SDX Upgrade Project website as the current beta version.

 

It can be downloaded from the section Download->Beta.

 

Please read the whatsnew.txt file carefully before trying it out. Issue reports welcome.

 

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1 hour ago, drac030 said:

For the brave souls, who fear nothing and like to be at the cutting edge:

 

SpartaDOS X 4.49e has been just uploaded to the SDX Upgrade Project website as the current beta version.

 

It can be downloaded from the section Download->Beta.

 

Please read the whatsnew.txt file carefully before trying it out. Issue reports welcome.

 

Bravo!!

 

Time for us to stop being chickens... ? 

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I just went to FJC's site yesterday and upgraded to 4.49.  To do that upgrade, was given a 720K ATR image, that had a couple flashers and a 512 rom.   After figuring out that I had to remove the SD Card from the Side 2, the flash worked.

 

Then I saw this 4.49e.

 

So, I downloaded it, it gave me a 256k rom.  And, I guess I'm supposed to know what to do with that?  I don't.  If it were 512k, I guess I'd just use the tool I downloaded yesterday with the ROM swapped.   

 

OK...typing and goign through the process.....

 

I have a user guide, a programmer guide, and instructions on using a multiplexer.  I've found a whatsnew.txt taht notes there are minor bug fixes to the flasher.


So there is a flasher somewhere...

 

So I opened up toolkit.atr in an emulator and started poking around in the disk, I found a utils directory, file utils, sys utils,  shell util, disk util, I didn't find anything called flasher.

 

There is another disk called SDX449e_side2.atr, I try to open that, it says unsupported dos format, and shows nothing.

 

Therefore by the laws of IT, there is a 100% chance that the flash is on that disk.

 

Sure enough, there is a program called flash_si on the disk.  It asks, if I want to erase: Yes.  Done.

Asks me to proceed Y:  error. programming failed.

 

So I try again, programming failed.

 

Fails every time on Bank 1. 

 

Status of side 2 unusable.

 

However at this time I'm going back to yesterday's 4.49, and that appears to be working.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Mark2008
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