I've been nursing along an aging Win98 computer for use with TR but was
resigned to give up the ghost and go exclusively to WriteLog at some point.
Then I saw the posts on using USB Thumb drives and decided to give it a try.
Since I had some difficulty, let me outline what ended up working and
working well. I will skip most of the drama of the failed attempts which
mostly demonstrate what I have forgotten about DOS. The end result was
quite simple. Kudos to N4ZR for the NCJ article and to KD4D and to K9TR
for their gracious assistance via e-mail - thanks fellows!
Went out this weekend and purchased a 512MB drive at Radio Shack and gave it
a try. First thing I learned was that my 2004 Dell XPS computer does not
support booting from USB so went the diskette route. I created a boot
diskette on the Win98 doing a format with system files. Here is the
config.sys file that worked:
DOS=HIGH,UMB
lastdrive=F
device=HIMEM.SYS
device=emm386.exe noems
Nothing fancy required. The AUTOEXEC.BAT used was:
lh smartdrv.exe C+ 1024 512
path=c:\tr;a:
c:
cd tr
tr
I tried using the Thumb drive without SMARTDRV but it was very slow.
Using the "+" option enables write behind in the caching which should
absolutely eliminate any bottleneck with the drive. Testing was done with
the large DX plus domestic TRMASTER.DTA file and it worked instantly. I
have 634K of free memory which is better than I get with my Win98 system DOS
boot so that should be great. I've been running TR in debug simulator
mode for hours and it seems to be perfect. I'll feel better after it
survives a real contest but it seems to be 100% and man is it fast!
Tom Whiteside
N5TW Georgetown, TX
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