c162-ee@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Filner) (02/15/90)
After all the talk and talk and talk about PC-DITTO II, I felt that maybe people should take a little notice of PC-SPEED. As I last heard from Avante-Garde many moons ago, I understood that PCD-II was NOT going to have an 8088 on it but was instead just some hardware support for the SOFTWARE emulator. I heard Norton SI claims of the 3 to 4 range. On the net it seems people who ordered their PCD2's in advance finally received the product but found after installation that it was impossible to get it to work - this being confirmed by AvanteGarde? Recently a friend of a friend sold me a PC-Speed which he had been unable (for lack of tech-spertise) to install in his Mega. I popped out my CMI accelerator from my 1Mb 520 ST and popped in the PC-SPEED. Instant Gratification. (almost instant) PC SPEED exists. Local stores have them in stock. It works. I'm currently running MSDOS 3.20 and using one 14mb partition as the PC's boot drive. It's a small, clean board, with a NEC V30 on it. It mounts over the 68000 with no soldering other than the one socket - and no main board mods required - you can take PCspeed out and your ST is back in nearly original condition. Performance : "Speed v0.99" says 3.2 times the speed of an XT. Not bad. CGA updating on a color screen is slowed by massive graphics updates, but the processor seems to cook along at a reasonable clip. It works fine in Mono. I DID trash partition D of my HD while installing MSDOS but that's my own fault - I should have backed it up before using the MSDOS SYS command. So - my question is, why is everyone still concerned with PC-Ditto II when PC Speed exists? Is there some superior feature of PCD2 that I didn't hear about? Does PCSPEED threaten to format my HD at random times? Anyway, PCSPEED seems great to me and PCDITTO seems like vapor-ware or even worse, a real product whose only function is to destroy working ST's??? Dan Filner c162-ee@zooey.berkeley.edu =---=---=----=---= of course I have no ties to either PCD2 or PCSPEED 's parent companies... ==-==-==-==-==-==-
nelson@kodak.UUCP (Bruce Nelson) (02/16/90)
In article <22099@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> c162-ee@zooey.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Filner) writes: > So - my question is, why is everyone still concerned with PC-Ditto II >when PC Speed exists? Quite possibly, because A-G offered PCD-II at half price to PCD-I owners, and A-G has their money. At the ACORN meeting last night, one member brought in the PCD-II he received yesterday (via UPS-Blue). Anothee member, who received his PCD-II last week reports that it works w/ MSDOS 2.1, not 3.x. It has a Norton SI of 4.2. he talked to A-G yesterday morning, and had 2 things to report: 1) The "problem" has been found, and will require 2 chips to be replaced. 2) The PCD-II board cannot be made smaller because it is a 6-layer pc board and there wouldn't be enough real estate on a smaller board to accomodate the internal traces. Bruce Nelson President, Atari Computer Owners of Rochester, NY