The Sinclair QL Forum

I just want to add that all native platforms have a WIN_CHECK command to actually check if a container file is continuous. Use that once to ensure your container is in one piece. Qx0 and Q68 could in theory also work with fragmented containers, but a) nobody has written the code for it and b) it would consume double the memory. The latter point is why for QL-SD this will never be an option anyway.

mk79 wrote:Qx0 and Q68 could in theory also work with fragmented containers, but a) nobody has written the code for it and b) it would consume double the memory.

And c) it would be slower.

It needs a few more milliseconds to read in the fat, but during actual operation it's just one additional table lookup per sector, which pales compared to the time it takes to actually read or write said sector. I don't think you could measure the difference.

Not sure about that, as significant speed optimization was achieved by multisector operations.

It's all cluster based, so even worst case you can still read 8 or 16 sectors at once. But yeah, it's all speculation anyway, I don't intend to implement it

I also think it wouldn't be good to leave the QL/GC/SGC hardware behind - making it even more complicated to distinguish the requirements.
Worth considering might be a default check for fragmentation at every driver startup or card change, if it does not consume too much time.

qxl.win (my little website) was down!

What I bloody pickle. It was registered through uniregistry, but they've been taken over, first by afternic and then godaddy (or something along those lines, no one seems to know how it worked). The name was due for renewal but expired and I didn't receive any messages. I couldn't log in to uniregistry so had no way to renew the name.

After hours searching and calling etc, I've finally got it fixed, paid the renewal and it's back online.