sbw@naucse.UUCP (Steve Wampler) (12/22/88)
I have a few questions that have been puzzling me. Nothing
earth shattering, but I'm curious...
(1) Why do some programs seem to run faster under the UA?
Take, for example, the simplistic 'life' program from
THE STORE!(tm).
(2) Has anyone tried to rewrite the ms-dos formatter to format
at 9 sectors instead of 8? How about a binary patch for
the current version? (This is the program run from the
UA when you request an MS-DOS floppy format.)
I've tried to disassemble the program (no luck with 'dis')
and tried to look at it with adb (I haven't found a valid
text address (yet)) with no results.
Thanks!
--
Steve Wampler
{....!arizona!naucse!sbw}jcm@mtunb.ATT.COM (was-John McMillan) (12/23/88)
In article <1078@naucse.UUCP> sbw@naucse.UUCP (Steve Wampler) writes: >... >(1) Why do some programs seem to run faster under the UA? > Take, for example, the simplistic 'life' program from > THE STORE!(tm). Perhaps you are memory limited. If you run a WINDOW under the UA, you have probably COVERED some/all UA window pixels. These "consume" RAM, and may increase your paging. Try creating a non-UA login and timing tests under IT against the UA times and the WINDOW-under-UA times. (Bet ya have less than 1.5MB RAM ;^) JC McMillan -- att!mtunb!jcm -- AND NOT SPEAKING FOR ANYONE
gst@gnosys.UUCP (Gary S. Trujillo) (12/27/88)
In article <1078@naucse.UUCP> sbw@naucse.UUCP (Steve Wampler) writes: >I have a few questions that have been puzzling me. Nothing >earth shattering, but I'm curious... > >(2) Has anyone tried to rewrite the ms-dos formatter to format > at 9 sectors instead of 8?... Well, it's been several months, and some folks may have missed the answer from Roger Abrahams that I received in response to my having asked that same question, so I'll quote him again on the subject: |From tailorme!marque.uucp!roger |To: gst@gnosys.uucp |Subject: Re: Minor fix to Mtools patch for 3.5" disks |Newsgroups: unix-pc.bugs,comp.sys.att,unix-pc.general |In-Reply-To: <56@gnosys.UUCP> |References: <611@bacchus.UUCP> |Organization: Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI |Message-Id: <8808212331.AA09610@marque.mu.edu> |Date: 21 Aug 88 23:31:02 CDT (Sun) |From: Roger Abrahams <roger@marque.mu.edu> | |In article <56@gnosys.UUCP> you (I) write: |>In article <611@bacchus.UUCP> darren@bacchus.UUCP (Darren Friedlein) writes: |>>... |>>One thing I'd like to find is a program like MsdosF.sh that will format |>>3.5" disks. Anyone know how to do this? |> |>For that matter, does anyone know how to format 5.25" floppies at 360K? |>Far as I know, /usr/bin/MsdosF.sh will only format 320K (8-sector) disks. | |Wrongo! If you have "strings", you can see that the program that does the |actual format (md_format) has the following options: -1289bv | |If you say "md-format -9" you will get a 360k disk. Actually unix can't make |a 9 sector disk (odd sectors are reserved for bad block mapping on a hard |disk, and this is also how it tells a hard from a floppy disk), so it |actually makes up a 10 sector format, but only allocates 9 sectors. | |I leave the rest of the options to you, to figure out yourself... | | - Roger I hope this answer helps you as much as it did me. The only problem is that I have found that I sometimes have problems reading floppies thus formatted when I try to read them on a MS-DOS machine. It may have to do with the El Cheapo diskettes I tend to use, or an alignment mismatch, or other factors, but the additional density necessary to write 10 sectors may also have some- thing to do with the problem. Far as I know, the UNIXpc cannot format disks with an odd number of sectors, though it can read them OK. Roger explained the situation to me, but I've forgotten the details. -- Gary S. Trujillo {linus,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!gnosys!gst Somerville, Massachusetts {icus,ima,stech,wjh12}!gnosys!gst