Floppy disk "accelerators"

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dieymir
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Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2019 12:22 pm

Floppy disk "accelerators"

Post by dieymir »

Remember all those old programs that claimed to speed up your floppy drives changing some parameters in the DPT?, I do.

I was tinkering with a couple of those old utilities (Quick Floppy and Flop) trying to extract more juice from a Gotek with HxC firmware installed. I know that floppies are slow in nature and you cannot expect miracles but I still think that it would be interesting trying to optimize DPT values specifically for floppy emulators. These are the relevant DPT parameters:

* Step rate; since there are no head/tracks involved I think the best value is the minimum (0Fh). (32 - 15 * 2) ms -> (2ms)

* Head unload time in milliseconds. Again the best value seems to be the minimum (00h -> 32ms)

* Head load time in milliseconds. Again the best value seems to be the minimum (00h -> 0 ms)

* Motor wait timer. There is no motor spinning so, IMHO, this value does not really matter but we can put here the maximum value allowed (FFh -> 255 timer ticks, about 20 sec.)

* Head settle time. The best value seems to be the minimum one (00h -> 0 ms). This parameter is configurable in the latest HxC firmwares (default 12ms)

* Motor start time. The best value seems to be the minimum one (00h -> 0 sec.)

What do you think about this?

Jeff
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Re: Floppy disk "accelerators"

Post by Jeff »

yes i think that you can set all parameters to theirs minimum value.

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