28 Feb
2012
28 Feb
'12
6 p.m.
I remember taking a copy of NewDos 2.1+ , and an issue of 80-Micro to my local Radio Shack
and using their Model I to apply zaps to the OS to speed up the boot and step speed. The
store manager thought I was crazy, but it worked great! There were also zaps for TRS-DOS
1.3 which I applied to a copy of that, and made copies for the store.
They gave out the faster TRS-DOS to all their disk drive sales as a way to enhance the
sale. By that time, the drives were all Tandon TM-100's and could easily handle 12ms
stepping. I think I also applied the 40 track patch as well.
Al Hartman
From: Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com>
On 02/26/2012 01:56 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
One of the things that I remember about Apparat
(slightly before that)?
was that NewDOS (was it only in NewDos80, or all the way back to?
APRDOS?) gave the user the capability to set the step time, to be able?
to take advantage of the 5ms step time of the Tandon, etc. drives,?
rather than have to always step everything at 40ms to be able to?
handle the original SA400 (the original drive shipped with TRS80).?
IIRC, NEWDOS/80 allowed the step rate to be changed on a per-drive basis?
using the PDRIVE command. In fact, you could change an amazing number of?
parameters for the drive or the filesystem format using that command.
I don't think NEWDOS had such a command, though there might have been?
ZAPs (patches) to change the step rate globally.|