[Coco] CoCo bitbanger does 115200 bps !

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/4/06 8:39:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
theother_bob at yahoo.com writes:

>Way  Cool! How does this compare to the CoCo's normal speed floppy disk  
>access?
>Also curious about double speed disk access (ala HDB-DOS)  and hard drive
>access.



Yeah, good stuff!  And I got excited a year ago when I figured out how  to 
read MIDI at 312500 bps (while parsing the MIDI 2- and 3-byte groups).
 
ISTR the Coco floppy data rate is about the same, 100K/s, but I think  that's 
bytes, not bits, so floppy is still 8x faster.
 
Hard drive access is always done via an intermediate hardware buffer of 256  
or 512 bytes.  The bytes are read in/out by a tight software loop that goes  
between the hardware buffer and Coco RAM.  The faster the CPU and tighter  the 
code, the faster a whole file can be moved.
--Mike K.