Rana Systems Elite Series User Manual

Page 258

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ELITE SERIES USER MANUAL

ENHANCED CP/M UTIL.

The “B” section is either a “+“ or a space. If

a “+” is printed, that means that your system

does not currently have a controller card in it

which will allow talking to that drive. All

drives from a certain drive letter up through

drive P: (highest allowable CP/M drive) would

have “+”s, depending upon the number of control-

lers in your system. All drives from I: through

P: will have "+"s since enhanced CP/M only sup-

ports up to eight drives (A: through H:).

The “C” section concerns itself with the type of

drive model which is assigned to that drive

letter. This assignment is completely indepen-

dent of what type of drive is actually connected

to your Apple at that particular drive position.

What is printed at this position in the message

determines how CP/M will treat that particular

drive, regardless of whether or not the drive is

capable of being treated that way. Some exam-

ples of why you would “lie” to CP/M will come

later. Drives I: through P: will not report any

model type since the enhanced Apple II CP/M does

not support these drives.

The "D" section reports the seek speed at which

the drive will be positioned from track-to-track

by CP/M. This also is regardless of whether or

not the drive is capable of seeking at the given

speed. This field is printed for all drives

regardless of whether or not the enhanced CP/M

supports the drive. This is because very spe-

cialized machine language programs can do disk

I/O which bypasses the CP/M operating System,

but which still rely on the system disk control-

ler routines to position the drive for them.

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