[Coco] Preserving old CoCo diskettes...

[Roger Taylor]

At 08:23 PM 5/18/2010, you wrote:
>Roger,
>I won't say it's a bad solution, but I take issue that it is the 
>best.  It's ok to be proud of something, but when you say it is the 
>best, you should be ready to back that opinion up with quantifiable data.
>As well you should.  Darren Atkinson did a great job designing the 
>hardware, and you've done a nice job marketing it.


If we're going to do this in the forum, the least you guys could do 
is tease a little, maybe bait me a few times.. you know, the usual 
tricks?  Hell no, here we go Already.  But the gloves are coming off 
this time.  :)

I can see you took the time to craft an overall witty reply to Mark's 
request for you to jump into this conversation he so-politely 
hijacked from Gene and I, but nothing you said has a single point.

Look, I'll go another round with both of ya, but you have GOT to get 
some sleep or this isn't going to turn out good.  You've both been on 
the road for a while and maybe just a little groggy.

Nobody over here ever said a negative word about one of your products 
or even mentioned a single word about your stuff.  I bring up the 
word "6551" and howdy-doody, here they come again.

Boisy, are you claiming that Darren completely designed the boards, 
or are you claiming that we co-designed them, and who do you think 
did the firmware as well?  % vs. %, I demand to know the whole story 
and who did what.  Don't hold back, Boisy!!  Tell it ALL to the whole 
class or sit your butt back down, but please don't come in here with 
a half-ass story and think I'm going to keep totally quiet.



> > I forgot to mention, on this firmware benchmark thing: the early 
> OS-9 drivers for the Drive Pak read card-LSN0 on each sector 
> transfer, so there was 1024 card bytes read for every 256 CoCo 
> bytes requested.   Today's driver cuts that in half.  Tomorrow's 
> driver will cut that in half when I move to the deblocking 
> scheme.  If I can get the megaread (not really a good tool) down to 
> 1:09 or so, I'm happy with this, but I won't trade a single bit of 
> quality or stability just to meet somebody else's expectations of 
> what a false benchmark should show.
>
>Megaread doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but it has been a 
>standard for measuring throughput on the CoCo under OS-9 for near 
>two decades.


I'm glad somebody admitted that the program is older than the 
dinosaurs.  Thank you for clearing that up!  Now drop down to DOS and 
do some more testing on ALL DEVICES you're benchmarking.  Post those 
results as well.  I'll be here.  I'm not going anywhere.


>As someone who sells CoCo hardware, you should expect it to be 
>benchmarked and tested for performance.  This is not an attempt to 
>knock your product; it merely states what its performance is 
>relative to other devices.
>The current megaread time for your pak with an SD card is around 254 
>seconds or so.  It sounds like you've identified the issues that are 
>causing less than ideal performance, so it would be great to see how 
>subsequent generations of your driver stack up.


Texas Bullshit, Boisy!  You want to quote the results from an early 
OS-9 driver, that's fine with me.  I've got 35 more paks to build and 
I don't have time for this crap.  I clearly said that two sectors 
were being read for each transfer in the earlier drivers, and you 
Clearly "benchmarked" that pak.  Thank You.

The OS-9 partition w/ new drivers can be downloaded to the pak quite 
easily, so why is this a hardware issue?


>As for deblocking, SuperDriver handles this very well and has a 
>myriad of other features.  You could save yourself a lot of time and 
>write a low level driver that plugs right into SuperDriver.  The 
>documentation is online at www.cloud9tech.com and the product comes 
>with a sample low level driver that you can start with.  All you 
>need to do is write the low level routines to talk to your device 
>and hand back the data according to the documented 
>specifications.  You get partitioning, deblocking, write 
>verification, automatic drive size querying, and smart caching all for free.

Now you're telling me I can't handle a simple native sector 
split?  And that I need documentation?  Are you purposely insulting 
me or did it just happen by mistake about 8 times in one message?

Boisy, and Mark.......  come on guys!!!!!  Jesus Christ.



-- 
~ Roger Taylor