Re: Apple II vs Atari 800

[Payton Byrd <plbyrd@gmail.com>]

On Apr 15, 10:48 am, "Russg" <russg...@MUNGEsbcglobal.net> wrote:
> (about the Commodore 1541 and JiffyDOS).
> I only briefly ventured into Commodore 128D.
> I had a 1541, and it was very slow, cassette
> speed it seemed.
> I take it JiffyDOS fixed that.  What is JiffyDOS?
> A cart, or a plug in item?  Atari had/has
> speedup DOSes and disk formatting, but I
> never liked them as I got errors with my drives
> with the speed ups.
> If we're talking plug in adapters, the Atari had
> hard drive interfaces that worked on a parallel
> bus at 115Kbaud.

The 1541 is many, many times faster than cassette even without any
speed ups.  Yes, it's slow, but not that slow.  JiffyDOS is a ROM
solution that replaces the KERNEL ROM in both the computer and the
drive.  It still uses the IEC bus, but it uses two lines
simultaneously for data, thus doubling the theoretical bandwidth of
the IEC bus.  Unlike the DOSs for Atari, the stock CMD Kernel calls
are all intact except for the cassette routines, which honestly aren't
used by anyone using JiffyDOS.  JiffyDOS provides complete support for
the standard CBM DOS commands, so programs that use the normal KERNEL
calls and the CBM DOS commands are 100% compatible with JiffyDOS.