RANA Systems Elite Controller, User Manual

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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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