[Coco] Emulators, disk drives and … 6ms?
L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net
Thu Mar 6 18:49:53 EST 2025
Really old (pre Coco) drives could have been limited to 30 ms. The original Coco drives (TEC) were limited to 20 ms - I think Steve used that in Sands of Egypt for a disk access speed increase. All other drives that Tandy sold for the Coco were capable of 6 ms (as pretty well 3rd party ones were).
Sent from my iPhone
> On Mar 6, 2025, at 4:49 PM, Allen Huffman via Coco <coco at maltedmedia.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> --
> Coco mailing list
> Coco at maltedmedia.com
> https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>
More information about the Coco
mailing list