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Subject: Re: REBEL CENTURY and HARD DRIVES

Author: Ratko V Tomic

Date: 13:57:42 11/05/99

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All Rebel's 9 and up have been doing similar thing on each move, making repsonse
time during the move switch (when you need responsevnes the most) sluggish,
especially problematic in blitz. Since to maximize memory for Rebel, one might
not use smartdrv.exe (disk cache program), this becomes much more noticable than
with other programs doing frequent disk writes. But loading smartdrv.exe (via
your config.sys) you can reduce somewhat the appearance of this behaviour. If RC
has option to configure (drive) where its continuously updated files are, one
could specify that those go onto RAM disk, but that again would take memory from
Rebel for the rma disk driver and the ram disk. That's why I never used Rebel 9
after the initial try uncovered this annoyance, and went back to Rebel 8.

It would be much better, if Ed is reading here, and he either knows a command
line option to turn this constant disk read/write (for each move) off, or if he
can add a patch or a minor upgrade at some point which handles it in a nicer
way. Short of that, if he could tell us the file names being read/written, one
could write a small TSR which intercepts these DOS calls and throws away the
write buffer and tells Rebel that writing went Ok (or gives a dummy read buffer
on reads). Short of knowing these files, one would need and XRAY program which
logs all DOS calls in a file, then one can apply the previous solution. I would
prefer the minor RC upgrade option, which would also add some higher resolution
bitmaps for the board & pieces (VESA specs supports such resolutions).



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