In article <1993Jan9.235112.13420@news2.cis.umn.edu> zant0001@student.tc.umn.edu (Eric Zanto) writes:
>Why is it that I lose characters on my serial port when I access my hard
>drive, connected to the Dataflyer SCSI? I just got it, and from what I've
>heard it is different from the older ones they use to sell, which had more
>jumpers on them. The one I have has the 2.0 Autoboot ROM(supports CBM
>RDB) and has 6 chips on it. Not much there, a few latches, ROM, SCSI
>chip. Does it use DMA now or something? My system seems to slow quite a
>bit when it's accessed alot.
Probably the non-DMA controllers based on the 5380 (Wordsync, Nexus, TrumpcardPro, etc) have logic to insert wait states (halt the CPU) until a 16-bit data word is ready. This would have the same effect as a DMA transfer in that interrupts
are sometimes locked out for long periods of time.