CompuServe Messages

"The Amiga on the other hand is usually trying to query the drive within 3 seconds of powerup. Now the drive should be responding by this time, but quite a number actually don't." I recognize what you are trying to say, but with all due respect, I can't agree. I've never seen or heard of a medium- to large-capacity hard drive that is going to spin-up and be ready within 3 seconds of power-up. My Gig-plus SCSI drives on the Macintosh sure don't. The excuse that Commodore designed their controller to the IDE spec and that the drives are responsible falls flat on its face – unless you think it's good practice to simply design something to a spec and not test it against real world devices and situations. As I understand it, the "1eff00" is Decimal 255, at least another posting around here states such. I haven't checked it. But if that's the case, then the Amiga engineers failed again as did their manual writers in not explaining the situation in greater detail in the manual so users wouldn't be scratching their heads in befuddlement. Your explanation, while I recognize it as being well-intentioned, simply further convinces me that the Amiga is poorly engineered. (And, no, it isn't the only poorly designed machine in the world.)