A lost art? Star Commander!

[redrumloa]

I am trying to use Star Commander on an older 200Mhz laptop w/Win95(in DOS, no Win loaded command prompt only).

So far I have NORMAL mode working like a charm it appears, however TURBO and WARP don't work at all. Huh? I never had a problem back in the day and my memory is a bit hazy.


Itronix laptop (200Mhz) -> XE1541 cable -> 1571 drive

I'm sure it's something simple as a setting, just wondering if it rings a bell before I go spend time digging through the settings and such.

I feel the annual 8bit bug bitting me BAD :lol:

[LocalH]

Hm, it's been a while myself, but I seem to remember a timing setting (and I think there was an auto-calibration in at least one version of SC that I used), that had to be set depending on your CPU speed. When I was transferring disks, I was using a regular X1541 cable, and the only problem I had, was that occasionally after dumping a whole disk, I'd get a 74 error - but the contents of the dump were 100% correct.

[redrumloa]

Hi LocalH, thanks for the response.

I think you mean delay value? I used recalibrate and it set a value of 7. Before recalibrating it was at 10 by default and didn't work even in NORMAL mode. Hmm, i guess it would make sense to tinker with that first:-) Will try.

[adolescent]

You have async turned off right?  I can't remember if that was the problem I had.  I also ended up switching to a true DOS (Dr.DOS if I recall) and 64HDD so I haven't used SC in a while.

[LocalH]

If you're running in a single-tasking environment such as DOS, it's best to turn async off, as SC will have realtime control over the parallel port and thus should be able to handle a faster synchronous transfer. However, if you ever want to use SC from within the Win9x GUI (I did this occasionally for C64 development), you'll have to turn async on. If you plan to use SC in both DOS mode and the GUI, I found it best to make two copies of the config file, one with async on, one with it off. Then, I merely set up two batch files - one for async and one for synchronous. Each batch file echo'd a bit of information regarding the circumstances that are best for each setting, then copied the respective config file to the name SC expected, then launched SC.

However, if you can't get SC to work at all with async off, it's worth trying it with async on. It'll probably only really work in Normal mode, but an async normal mode is better than none at all.

[redrumloa]

Ok I tried changing the delay value, no help. It must not like the motherboard. Oh well it works well in NORMAL mode, just slow. I got done what i needed to get done, this laptop is temp. Thanks again.