dedina@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (12/18/87)
czei@cdbkc1 writes: > In January's issue of Electronic Musician, there was a quick review > of the JiffyDOS/64 firmware quickload product for the C64. It > ... > but it's real advantage is that it is supposedly > 100% compatable with existing software. > Has anyone had any experience with this product? I've had JiffyDOS for about a year, and I like it quite a bit; as a matter of fact, its hard to imagine now how I ever did without it. However, as we all know, NOTHING is 100% compatible with existing software. First, the good stuff. Jiffy/DOS isn't just a fastloader. The best thing about it in my mind is that is speeds up all disk access, not just loads. So any program which accesses the disk (and doesn't have its own fastload software) will run quite a bit faster with Jiffy/DOS. Also, it provides a number of useful wedge-like commands but with a sensible syntax, like DIR, SCRATCH,FORMAT,TYPE, etc. The documentation is good, and they have a "compatability guarantee", or at least they did a year ago when I bought it. This means you can get your money back if you have software which doesn't load with Jiffy/DOS. It works with almost all my software, so I wouldn't be suprised if its compatible with over 99% of commercial software. Now the bad stuff. Jiffy/DOS has worked with all my software but the Quantum-Link software. Invoking the compatibility guarantee, I sent it back with a description of the problem. A few weeks later a new Jiffy/DOS arrived. The Q-Link problem had been fixed, and the installation kit now included a switch which would switch off Jiffy/DOS in case you ran into compatibility problems. All was fine for months. However, I cancelled my Q-Link subscription and recently restarted it, so I got a new Q-Link disk, and what do you know, the new Q-Link disk won't run under Jiff/DOS. Not only that, it won't run with Jiffy/DOS switched off, either! When I replaced the Jiffy/DOS roms with the original roms, the Q-Link software worked. Since I just used Q-Link for about a month and then cancelled it again, I never complained to GoodFellows (I think thats the name of the company, or something similar). One other negative thing. This happens very rarely, but its still kind of disturbing: Sometimes when I issue a disk command, like DIR, the drive just spins continuously and the C64 locks up. I have no choice but to reboot. Since I have a reset button on my 64 and Jiffy/DOS provides a built-in UNNEW command, this has never caused me to lose a program I was entering. However, like I said its disturbing. Maybe GoodFellows has fixed this bug by now; they seem to update Jiffy/DOS pretty regularly. Anyway, overall I think its great. It alleviates two of the worst problems with the C64: the worlds slowest disk drive, and weird, hard-to-remember disk commands. ------------------------------------- Mike Dedina Indiana University Speech Research Lab dedina@silver.bacs.indiana.edu Disclaimer: I have no association with GoodFellows, Inc. I don't even know if thats really their name.