*Suggestion* 250vb waiting time after access to disc

[Nju79]

Hi there, In the documentation for every AmiBlitz version, it is strongly recommended to wait around 250 vertical blanks after accessing a drive before switching to Blitz mode. The reason for this should be that drive accesses can still occur within this time.

I find this waiting time very annoying, especially when I just want to quickly reload something from floppy disk or hard drive. I've seen numerous other games not have this waiting time and are able to stop the drive when they finish loading data. This not only applies to assembler or C games, but also to AMOS games (e.g. the newly released Shadows of Sergoth).

I assume that AmiBlitz has no such function, e.g. to stop the motor/access of a floppy/hard disk drive "immediately"? Would it be possible to implement such a function in AmiBlitz?

Best regards

[daedalus2097]

It would be interesting to see what those examples do in this situation. Waiting 5 seconds is probably related to booting from floppy, and to using a hard drive with old (1.x) versions of the OS which had a delayed cache flush. It's pretty simple to turn the floppy drive motor off, there's a motor control function in trackdisk.device so maybe a command library to handle low-level trackdisk.device (or generic #?.device) commands would help? It's a difficult thing to do safely though - with a multitasking OS, drive access can happen at any time due to another program, including within that 5 second wait period.