Posted By
Krill
on 2012-07-12
07:46:05
|  Re: Please help testing: New loader release imminent
Hi all,
sorry for being absent for a while.
In the meanwhile, I'm close to finishing implementing a new, faster protocol which allows for multiple drives on the bus, and this hopefully without the 1571 issues experienced with the 2bit+ATN protocol.
I plan to release the loader within the coming week(s), and will prepare a new Plus4 test build soon.
crock: Can you check if your 1541-II setup still fails with http://krill.earthtomoon.net/loader-v136.zip? Keep in mind only one drive is allowed on the bus in this version. Thanks!
KiCHY: In the minimal Plus/4 configuration (loading raw, no built-in decompression), the loader uses slightly more than $0100 bytes once installed. It comes as source (see link above), so yes, you can relocate it.
bubis: Native 1551 support is planned for the future. I really want to see that drive's blazing speed unleashed in an IRQ-loading setup some day. I expect it to be about twice as fast as 1541, so roughly 7 kB/s.
The loader uses a dir buffer with 40-something entries (sliding window ring buffer, file names hashed to two bytes), so it rarely needs to access the dir track.
Dir art is supported by setting the maximum file name length to e.g. 2, then loading "01*" and similar - all extra characters in the dir entries are ignored and can be used for dir art. Alternatively, you can hide a second directory on any track and make the loader use it, or load by track/sector, so you can do whatever you want in the normal directory (both alternatives break 1551 compatibiliy, as they contradict with KERNAL fallback). An actual "load next file" call is planned for some remote day in the future.
Thanks and greetings!
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