EVERHART%ARISIA.decnet@crdgw1.ge.com (08/14/89)
I found the CrossDos readonly file on Deep Thought shortly after it was uploaded there by its author. It has now been installed on my A1000, much to my delight. CrossDos lets one read MSDOS diskettes under names DI0:, DI1:, DI2:, etc. without losing the ability to use the drives as df0:, df1:, df2:, etc. for Amiga format disks. You need only refer to a disk in MSDOS format as DIn: and utilities work properly with it. Subsequent use as DFn: continues to work also. Note: I have a 3 disk system (2 3.5" and a 1020 5.25" disk drive) so I did not try to apply the patches to deal with the trackdisk.device raw I/O bug; these may or may not be correct. I have been impressed with the speed of crossdos. It seems to access 3.5" disks in MSDOS format as fast as, or possibly faster than, the ps/2 model 80 at the office. It is considerably faster than Dos-2-Dos or pccopy. Needless to say, I mailed my check almost immediately for the r/w version. The presence of a raw i/o device in this package offers the intriguing possibility of access to CP/M disks too. I have some code that does this (for some cp/m formats) but which lacked the ability to do low level I/O (and I lacked sufficient motivation to bother with it). With the crossdos piece, low level cp/m access seems easy enough to just do. If you haven't tried crossdos yet, and need to read MSDOS floppies, give it a try. Very handy. Incidentally, the crossdos approach is much more useful than the file copy only approach. I can now pick up old archival msdos disks, load them and inspect archives directly, copying files off that format ONLY when I need them. I can do inspections from inside editors or utilities to pull in boilerplate text, etc. etc. where having to copy the disk first to then check if this particular arc file has what I want gets to be a real pain. The copy utility works, and using the clone keyword can even preserve dates. Not bad...not bad at all. Glenn Everhart Everhart@Arisia.ge.com Everhart%Arisia.decnet@crd.ge.com
OHA101%URIACC.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu (F. Michael Theilig) (08/18/89)
I too must give CrossDOS high praise. Delete MS-DOS (the file
conversion utility), forget DOS-2-DOS, CrossDOS is much better than
expected! Had I the application for heavy PC conversion, I would
immediately order the read/write version! (A friend of mine will).
I renamed the PC devics as A: and B: to make more sence.
Copy from B: to RAM: of a 160k (or so) file was 35 seconds.
Exact same file from DF1: to RAM: was 15 seconds.
Criticisms: every time I CD'd to a PC disk, I got the requester
telling me that the disk was write protected. Perhaps to encourage me
to get the read/write version? Also, INFO command is extremely slow with
a PC disk mounted.
Thank you, Hobbit Hole BBS (I forget the sysop's name. Sorry.)
Thank you CrossDOS.
One more thing, when transfering text files, I noticed that the
new file has an imbedded ^M at the end of each line when Emacs-ed.
/* F. Michael Theilig OHA101 at URIACC.Bitnet
"There is no Dark Side in the Moon, really ...
matter of fact it's all dark." */