[Coco] megaread

Aaron Wolfe aawolfe at gmail.com
Sat May 22 17:19:24 EDT 2010


On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 12:13 PM, Darren A <mechacoco at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/22/10, Christopher Hawks wrote:
>>
>>       Then I can check the speed of my 360k floppys:
>> load megaread
>> date -t; megaread 256 </d0@; date -t
>>
>> May 22, 2010 10:00:31
>> May 22, 2010 10:00:55
>>
>> So that's 24 sec for a quarter meg, 96 seconds for a megabyte read.
>>
>> Faster than Drivewire???
>>
>> Geez, now Boisy's gonna think I'm out to get him...
>>
>> Somebody better check this.
>>
>
> ---
>
> The data transfer speed of DriveWire (115 kbps on a CoCo 3) is less
> than half that of a floppy (250 kbps).  When performing a sequential
> read without substantial head movement, it is not surprising that a
> floppy drive would be faster.
>

~120 seconds is right for DriveWire on Coco 3.  There are certainly
times I wish DW was a bit faster, such as when doing big file copies,
duplicating a disk, etc.  For everyday stuff (writing code, goofing
around, playing games) it's really not bad at all.  I've never had the
pleasure of owning a floppy drive (despite asking for one at Christmas
several years in a row :)  but from what I've seen on others I think
the end result is about the same for "average" use.  Some things a bit
slower, some a bit faster, overall in the same class of performance.

Where DW starts to really shine is as part of a more advanced coco
setup.  I picked up a SuperIDE controller at the cocofest.  Running
off this card and using DriveWire only for networking, printing, MIDI,
etc is quite nice.  The SuperIDE is of course blazing fast on the
disk, and taking the disk traffic out of the DW channel speeds up
everything else there nicely.

I have been enjoying the speed at which this system can compile C as I
work on some new projects.  Edit the source on my favorite modern PC
editor, switch to a telnet session to OS-9 where my build script
automatically uses dw to pull the source file from the PC to the Coco
and make it... very fast dev environment.

-Aaron



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