Re: [hatari-devel] Re: Boot time

[Nicolas Pomarède <npomarede@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/06/2013 18:25, Eero Tamminen wrote:

> > Well, I think that's an error in the fdc emulation that timeouts too
> > soon when no disk is inserted (or an unformatted disk (but you can't do
> > this with ST/MSA)). I should wait 1.6 sec for each read access when no
> > disk is in drive, but at the moment I just returns immediatly with the
> > appropriate error bit in the status register.
>
> Is there anything that breaks when it gets that error immediately
> i.e. depends on that behavior?

Up to now, I didn't see a program that breaks when it gets the info too 
soon that there's no disk in drive ; but it could happen (imagine a 
program that plays a different music depending on the fdc status, the 
music would be played too short for example). So it should be fixed one 
day, even if it's certainly harmless.

> IMHO it would be nicer if you would investigate why EmuTOS is still
> slow although it gets error immediately... :-)

I don't know what EmuTos does. It's up to the program to decide what to 
do when a read sector command reports "record not found" ; you can retry 
1 time, 2 times, 10 times, ... Maybe Emutos retries too many times or 
add some unnecessary pauses between retries.


> > By the way, don't we miss an option to boot without an already
> > configured gemdos HD drive ? I can't see it (only option is to press F12
> > and eject on gemdos drive).
>
> I added support for this:
> http://hg.tuxfamily.org/mercurialroot/hatari/hatari/rev/127879ca3b0b
>
> Similarly to several other Hatari options, HD device is now disabled
> when empty string is given:
> 	$ hatari -d ""

Thanks, this can be useful to automate tests when the program can't 
support HD emulation (see Transbeauce II demo protection for example)


Nicolas