#80286 Bridge Card When
8 messages in this thread
Ben,
It isn't the time that the autoboot saves, but the very fact that you don't
have to have a particular floppy in the drive. That's what the issue is with
everyone I have heard wanting autoboot. Personally, while I think it's 'nice',
it isn't important to me. I will enjoy the few seconds saved by autobooting,
but keeping a bootable floppy in place is not a problem with me.
Larry – I not only don't think that you have picked "the" issue, I don't
think it is an issue at ALL.
Let's see how the members of the forum respond.
Do you care if there needs to be the physical presence of a floppy in a
disk drive in your amiga in order for a fast autoboot to take place?
Or, is your concern that the boot to the HD simply be fast? If putting a
floppy in your system drive allowed you to "autoboot" as fast as a
controller that "had" autoboot built in, would you do it, or would you
elect to trade in your current unit for a new one?
What if the disk controller that has the "real" autoboot (IE, it requires
that you do NOT have a floppy in the drive) is NO FASTER than if you have
this special floppy, and yet costs more?
Remember, that with the "hardware" autoboot, you have far less flexability
of WHICH device your system will boot to – it's going to boot to the
highest priority hardware device, period; with the floppy, YOU choose which
device boots – and no time penalty at all. Just as quick.
So – spend more for a hardware solution that is just as fast, only not as
flexible as, a special boot floppy. Which?
I kinda like Ben's idea. Changing and buying new ROMs when bugs are found
is disconcerting. Also, having one certain boot disk doesn't make much
difference to me. Has CBM ever been exposed to this idea, Ben? How about
sending it to Haynie or Beats in a snail-mail letter? To me, autoboot
means FAST boot. Right now, swapping and waiting for gronks just to boot a
hard disk makes the Amiga a toy. I turn on my AT, and it's up a few
seconds later.
Well, see…. have you seen haynie or beats here? I haven't. If I don't see
em, I don';t talk to em. CBM doesn't answer phone calls, doesn't respond
to developer applications, gets addresses, phone numbers, and names
wrong… and lives on BIX. So, no… I haven;t talked to them. You wanna
talk to them? <grin>
Hey, don't look at me. Syndesis does have an official developer status,
for what it's worth. So far, we call CBM, they say thyey don't know, we
use personal contacts instead, who usually get the answer, or at least show
us the direction, shape and color of the deadend we've run into, once
again. The last one had to do with fonts, Finkel says Text() blows up on
characters (like Sapphire/19/char 129) that have zero CharBitWidths, and
that CBM's fonts contain plenty of characters like this… yet Kodiak, who
wrote the fonts stuff, knew of no such bug, and was surprised to know that
CBM fonts have plenty of violations of their own rules for making bitmap
fonts, and that Finkel says Calligrapher tells lies about font
characteristics, and that FontEd doesn't report similar numbers, and that
printing the values yourself gives yet another set of values… I love
fonts now.
Geeeez…. and I thought the serial.device was bad! <grin>
So, you talk to them, eh? <eyeing John contemplativly>
My partner's husband has sussed the serial.device, he's working on DECnet
for the Amiga. I've heard a few horror stories, from him, and from people
trying to do MIDI with it… Do I talk to them? I try not to. Harriet
calls them first. Then we use personal contacts to get the answers. Even
that doesn't work. On the bright side, the lack of good docs for this
machine has brought more people together, around the country, cooperating
in elightened self-interest.
I have to admit that one.