[Coco] Emulators, disk drives and … 6ms?

[Allen Huffman]

This may be dumb, but this is what came to mind last night:

On real hardware, we’d POKE to 6ms to speed up our disk access. During my CoCo 3 RS-DOS days, I always used Steve Bjork’s DFIX that did 6ms and other things. Before that, I had some loader program that put the 64K CoCo 1/2 into RAM mode and did it.

Was 6ms a limit of the floppy controller, or our drive hardware of the day?

If I do this in Xroar or other emulators, would the virtual disk access also speed up?

Could it go to a faster step rate, too?

I will have to test, but thought I’d ask before I dive in.

		— A