New Apple /// driver for CFFA revisions 1 and 2 available
Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2011 7:46 amThanks to the hard work of Dale Jackson and Dave Schmenk, there's a
new driver available for the CFFA (rev1 and rev2) boards. Dave took
Dale's driver, combined the support for both board revisions, and sped
things up a little more.
I've posted the driver package, including an updated CFFA Utilities
disk with the new driver pre-configured for slot 1, on apple3.org.
Get it here:
http://apple3.org/iiisoftware.html
Scroll down to "System - Drivers"; you'll find the CFIDE_140A.zip
package.
In Dave Schmenk's own words:
new driver available for the CFFA (rev1 and rev2) boards. Dave took
Dale's driver, combined the support for both board revisions, and sped
things up a little more.
I've posted the driver package, including an updated CFFA Utilities
disk with the new driver pre-configured for slot 1, on apple3.org.
Get it here:
http://apple3.org/iiisoftware.html
Scroll down to "System - Drivers"; you'll find the CFIDE_140A.zip
package.
In Dave Schmenk's own words:
I took Dale's latest drivers for the CFFA with and without the
version 2 CPLD for fast and throttled transfers, worked over the
source to make it easier to read, cleaned up some code paths, rewrote
the two transfer routines and combined them into one driver. It also
retains compatibility with the current CF data layout.
The driver defaults to slot 1 and slow transfers. This will work on
the later rev CFFA, but is the safest default. To change the driver
to use the fast routines, enter the System Configuration Program, load
the drivers, install the CFIDE.DRIVER driver, edit the driver
configuration bytes for .CFIDE1 and set the third byte to a 1. You
can change the slot assignment in the SCP also.
This is ALPHA so be sure not to blow anything important away (I live
on the edge and test on my development machine). All my CFFAs are Rev
2 so I can't promise it works on a Rev 1.
I timed boot times using the slow and fast xfer options and saw
about a 2 second boot time improvement. 26.3 vs 24.2 seconds. This
included the floppy part of the boot all the way up to the Pascal menu
(Pascal was loaded on the CFFA).