Re: New IIgs owner.

[Alex Eisenhut <eisenhut@technologist.com>]

> 
> Actually there was an upgrade to the C64 called the Mach 5 which
> was a cartridge you put in the cart slot on the machine which gave
> the disk I/O a 500% boost. I understand that the boost you achieve
> is actually by boosting the baud rate of the serial port. Commodore
> was conservative and didn't use a high baud rate for the floppy drive
> and most of the ROM enhancers just changed the baud rate to
> a higher value.
> 
It was a bit more complex than that. It was more a question of
reprogramming
the drive to transmit more than one bit at a time by using the other
lines 
on the serial port such as ser_atn and ser_clk to transmit data.
The Mach 5 is actually not very fast, the Super Snapshot Turbo 25 system
loaded at 25 times the normal rate by using a special format on the
disk.