LPT Mod / Palmzip 1.25 / Zip drive

[Chuckphd53]

Well, made the changes to a standard printer addon cart. changed to reflect LPT2 address and gave it Bi-Dir capability.

this was in hopes it would speed up my attached Zip100 drive. It did not....

When I do a DIR on the zip, it takes a full 60secs to read and display contents then finish.

but this is ok, just thought I read using a Bi-Dir port would speed things up//...

I am using Palmzip 1.25 I purchased from Klaus Peichl.

chuck

[Trixter]

What you're running into is actually the DIR display speed, which is unfortunately about ~55 seconds the first time you do a DIR on a FAT16 filesystem. DOS scans the free cluster list the very first time you perform a DIR after system boot, and because the DOS memory structures are in the slow RAM portion of a PCjr, it just takes a while. The good news is that subsequent DIRs to the same device are full speed because DOS now has the free cluster info. Try it, the second DIR should be much faster.

And it's good you did the bidirectional mod, since that will speed up files written to the ZIP drive.

When did you purchase palmzip? I thought Klaus was no longer responding to purchase orders for it.

[Chuckphd53]

I actually just bought it from Klaus last week, he was very prompt and also rcvd a nice email from him, was glad to see his efforts are still paying off... fantastic..

thanks for the head up in the Dir stuff..

let me see if I have it right...
if I read the Dir , thnen read it again it is faster ?

I noticed that if I read another Sub Dir on the Zip it still takes a full minute...’’

on a side note, Since it has been a few years working with Dos, I noticed that the sub dir’s do not show on the dos line.
ie. c:> is all it will ever display, is there a dos setting to display full path?


thanks
chuck

[Trixter]

At the root of your zipdrive, if you type DIR, it takes ~55 seconds. Immediately type DIR again and it should take under 10 seconds. Now, you went into a subdirectory, and if there are more than 112 files in that subdirectory, it has to keep reading clusters until it reads all of the entries. So if you have thousands of files in a single subdir, yes, that might take a while.

if you C: prompt never changes, you can change the prompt string, like this:

PROMPT $P$G

That will print the $PATH, then $Greater-than-symbol, at every prompt.

[Chuckphd53]

AH Got it.... will try it tomorrow..
‘also thanks for the prompt commands , wow am I rusty...haha
chuck