HDDRIVER 12.7 offers new features also for Falcon accelerators (CT*, DFB1), which for various reasons are still not officially supported. I would like to thank all beta testers who invested a lot of time in testing HDDRIVER 12.7 with various Falcon accelerators.
These are the main changes in HDDRIVER 12.70:
- HDDRIVER: More intelligent detection of IDE extensions: Mirrored IDE ports (duplicated devices) should not occur anymore.
- HDDRIVER: Support for both IDE ports of the CTPCI board (in 060 mode) at the same time. The second port is mapped to IDE port 4.
- HDDRIVER: Also with Falcons, HDDRIVER can be booted into Fast-RAM. A TOS with Fast-RAM support is a prerequisite. HDDRIVER in Fast-RAM offers particularly high IDE/SATA transfer rates and faster caches. With XFERRATE and a CTPCI board in 060 mode 12.8 MiB/s have been measured. With a 33 MHz DFB1 board the transfer rate is 4.3 MiB/s, with 50 MHz it is 4.8 MIB/s. Hard drives or DOMs often provide higher values than memory cards.
- HDDRIVER/HDDRUTIL: A conceptual change and a new option under "Performance" makes ALTRAMFX/AB040FIX (for Falcons with Fast-RAM) obsolete.
- HDDRUTIL: Under "Performance", for all Ataris without Alternate-RAM/Fast-RAM there is a new accelerated mode for transfers of big data blocks via ACSI or SCSI.
- HDDRUTIL: Not only TOS partitions, but any partition can be saved as an image file and loaded from an image file.