Re: Question about writing to 1541

From: Spiro Trikaliotis (ml-cbmhackers_at_trikaliotis.net)
Date: 2005-05-04 21:46:02

Hallo,

* On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 08:13:58PM +0200 Patrycjusz R. ?ogiewa wrote:
 
> Could it be that there were other devices that required writing the 
> value again? Some pre-historical drives or so? Or could the the 
> original docs be saying something: "the value written to the register 
> will remain in effect until changed/stopped but don't count on this as 
> it may change with future implementations of the write logic" - Yeah a 
> pure speculation of course...

Yes, this is pure speculation. I cannot add to this, as I have no
experience with the IEEE devices.

> >that the last sector written was always bad. Doing some more
> >analyses, I found out that it was always the last 2 bytes which were
> >wrong.
> 
> You mean the two padding bytes, right?

Exactly.

 
> 1. Two BVCs are required to correctly "close-up" the track write
> process because the first one checks if the previous  rather then
> current byte got written

Correct.

> and since those are pad-bytes there is no need to change anything
> in-between

Correct, too.

> 2. The ROM formatting routine does this correctly, yet the ROM sector
> write routine has a bug, which can make the last two bytes of a sector
> be different from what they were left at by the formatting routine

Yes, this is another correct statement. ;-)

> 3. In fact, every sector write should be closed up by the two BVCs if
> we want to do it properly

Well, yes, although opinions might be different here. I believe every
write should be closed up with two BVCs. Anyway, this is not really
necessary as no-one ever tests these bits. Thus, opinions may vary here.

 
Regards,
   Spiro.

-- 
Spiro R. Trikaliotis
http://www.trikaliotis.net/
http://cbm4win.sf.net/

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