Date : Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:11:43 -0000
From : BBCMailingList@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Domesday players and modern hardware
When I was reading chunks of data into the ARM Co-pro at 8MB
a time, it was taking about 40 minutes to do the reading, I reckon
that's about 3.5K per second!
I think it's worth bearing in mind that more modern Acorn hardware
can be a handy stepping stone in transferring the contents of
the Domesday Discs onto a PC. You don't necessarily have to go
from BBC Master 8 bit to PC 32 bit in one go. If you put a 32-bit
Acorn in the middle of the process then it might make things
easier.
For instance you might be able to connect the LV-ROM up to an
Archimedes or A5000 with SCSI podule and use a sector editor
to copy the whole lot onto a hard disc. If you copied it onto a
SCSI hard disc you might be able to connect that hard disc up
to your PC when the copying is done and collect the data from
there and give the LV-ROM a rest.
Or you might be able to do something similar to what I did,
reading sectors instead of actual files if that's what you need,
and read the data into the Beeb RAM or preferably a big
co-processor like the ARM co-pro so you could do 16MB at
a time, then send it to an Econet file server and pick it off
the Econet using an A5000 to copy it onto a SCSI disc you can
use in the PC.
There are ways and means of getting it done and it might
be more successful to use a two-stage copying process than
trying to get a PC talking to the LV-ROM player directly.
Best wishes,
Ian
----- Original Message -----
From: Jules Richardson [mailto:julesrichardsonuk@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 13:33:36 -0600
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] Domesday players and modern hardware
Richard Gellman wrote:
>> No word from the Camelion lot yet as to what they did...
>
> We* used a PC and a SCSI card to read it, and I believe some sector
> reading software.
Hmm, do you recall which card and which OS? Somewhere I've got an old PAS16
sound card that has a dumb SCSI controller on it - that has no BIOS so at
least won't get upset at boot time. Still doesn't get me around the fact that
Linux seems to 'offline' any device that doesn't respond to Inquiry at
startup, though (and I'd rather use some sort of Unix-a-like if possible just
because it does allow the user raw access to the device sectors).
> Note that speed is not really relevant when it comes to data transfer.
> The LV-ROM player is actually incredibly slow at reading data, so you
> never really get much more than about 15K/sec at the most.
Wow - I didn't think it would be quite that slow; I was guessing at somewhere
between 100 - 200K/sec or so.
> I built an interface to transfer the data to a PC via a User to
> Parallel port link, and it still took around 9 hours to do one disc.
Hmm, that's sort-of OK. I've run my system for quite a few hours before now
without hiccups. Are details of the cable that you used and the software that
was run at each end of the link available anywhere?
cheers
Jules
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