[Coco] 1000sx update

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 21 April 2006 23:48, KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 4/21/06 3:15:40 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>
>goosey at virgo.sdc.org writes:
>>If  Tandy had put a real expansion bus and a DMA controller in the
>>CoCo...  Ah well.
>
>If Tandy had merely brought out the DMA Request and Grant leads from
> eh  6809 as part of the bus, then at least controllers plugged into
> the MPI could have used DMA.  No-Halt floppies would have been the
> standard, and HDs  would be so much faster.
>
>>To use MFM on my CoCo, I'd have to dig up that old XEBEC  SASI-to-MFM
>>board and use the LR-Tech controller, and I don't think I'm  going
>> there. You know, that's why my CoCo 3 quit being my main 
>> computer... It simply could not keep a hard drive filesystem 
>> uncorrupted.
>
>I never had any real problems with file corruption under OS-9 with my 
> B&B and ST-225 MFM system.  At least not till I added a second
> ST-225,  which required an updated driver from Chris Burke.  The only
> file foulup I  ever had was on my MM/1 OS9/68K box, and that happened
> only once (no idea  why).
>
>That B&B MFM system may be clunky, but "the original is still the 
> greatest." --Mike K.

I'm of the opposite opinion Mike.  I bought one of the original B&B 
XT-RTC kits from Chris, the black alu sandwich held together with 3/4" 
posts.  I put, trying to fix a read problem, 3 different branded clones 
of the WD-1027 card in it at various times and never seemed to effect 
the fact that it would hand OS9 an empty buffer for a sector of the FAT 
when it was doing a file write.  I learned a great deal about the os9 
file systems file structures recovering from that, and probably lost 
irretrieveably a gigabyte of work on a 30 meg drive.  I probably cut 
100 acres of trees to print the assembly printouts as they were 
generated so I'd have hard copy to type back in if it was lost.

I eventually gave up and bought a 4n1, putting a maxtor 7120s on it and 
never had that problem again.

But, I had some old 10 and 20 meg mfm drives at the tv station that had 
been replaced with bigger ones and bought a B&B XT-RTC for the offices 
coco3.  It didn't do it, ever.  Even with two drives on it, an old ten 
mag tandon and a 20 meg st-225 it was bulletproof.  I even had a clone 
copy of one to the other and back running by cron in the wee hours of 
the night going to see if it would ever sneeze.  The only thing that 
was ever noticed was the janitorial folks mentioned that one of the 
drives was screeching pretty bad in the night.  I never did find out 
which one it was, and the copies were always identical the next day.  I 
did put a glob of vaselene on the rotors grounding contact of both of 
them though.  Still got that setup too by golly.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.