Rana Systems Elite Series User Manual

Page 307

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ELITE SERIES USER MANUAL

APPEN. A - DISK I/O

The data field has a checksum, similar to that

in the address field, to verify data. It also

involves exclusive-ORing data in pairs before it

is transformed by the look-up table above, best

illustrated by the figures below.

The read routine must read a byte, transform it

and store it, all in less than 32 cycles (time

to write a byte) or the information is lost. A

checksum computation to decode data greatly

speeds up the operation. As data is read from a

sector, the accumulator contains the cumulative

result of all previous bytes exclusive-ORed

together. The value of the accumulator after

any exclusive-OR is the actual data byte for

that point in the series. (Second figure.)

A third encoding technique, similar to the 5-

plus—3, still calls for the high bit to be set

but the byte may now contain one (and only one)

pair of consecutive zeros. This allows a great-

er number of valid bytes and permits the use of

a 6-plus—2 technique.

A six bit byte would have the form OOXXXXXX with

values $00 to $3F for a total of 64 different

values. With the relaxed requirements for valid

“disk” bytes, there are 69 different bytes ($96

to $FF). After removing the two reserved bytes

($AA and $D5) there are 67 “disk” bytes with

just 64 needed. With the mapping one to one

(with at least two adjacent bits set, excluding

bit 7) exactly 64 valid “disk” values are left.

The initial transformation is achieved by the

new prenibble routine with the results shown in

the last figure.

P a g e A - 3 6

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