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

[L. Curtis Boyle]

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
> 
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