Possible to speed up I/O subsystem of 5150?

[Jim Leonard]

Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
> Are you allowed to use more modern versions of DOS (i.e. post 3.3)?  If
> so, why not use a version that has SmartDrive built in?  Better yet, use
> Speedstor or some equally capable caching utility.  Or will caching not
> work for your purposes?

Yes, MS-DOS 6.22 is on there, but SMARTDRV requires XMS and my 5150 is the 
original 8088 (no XMS possible on an 8088 unless you have an EMS memory board 
and PC DOS 7.x or higher and a hacked driver).

Interesting note:  A 4.77MHz machine is so slow that I could actually benchmark 
that disk accessess were faster in 6.22 over 3.3.  A 2-minute test completed 3 
seconds faster under 6.22, so even though it takes up more RAM that my program 
was using to cache manually, I kept it.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)                    http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project?             http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at             http://www.mindcandydvd.com/


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