palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu (David Palmer) (02/08/89)
I have written a terminal emulator designed for the purpose of fast ASCII data capture (it keeps up at 19.2 kbaud when the display is turned off). It reads as much data as it can from the modem port buffer, writes it to disk, writes it to the screen (if the display is still turned on) and then repeats (read, write, possibly write). The program works fine on a floppy disk system (a dual-floppy Mac SE) but it loses data on a hard disk system (a single-floppy Mac+ with a a CMS 60 Mbyte disk.) If, however, I turn on the disk cache so that the program does not write to the physical hard-disk during the data capture, the program works again. I know that during the floppy disk accesses, even though the interrupts are turned off, the floppy disk polls the modem port often enough to prevent data loss. My question is this: Is this polling missing from the hard disk driver? Would anyone at Apple (or CMS, or anyone who knows the answer) care to comment? Thanks in advance. David Palmer palmer@tybalt.caltech.edu ...rutgers!cit-vax!tybalt.caltech.edu!palmer "I was sad that I had no shirt, until I met a man with no torso"