THE XF SPEEDY REVIEWED ---------------------- By FM and TML Supplier : Klaus Peters Price : DM 179,- It is almost unbelievable, but there are still new hardware kits designed and produced for the Atari 8-bit. The latest product of the German company 'Klaus Peters Elektronik + Software' is an upgrade-kit for the XF-551 disk-drive. This kit allows you to upgrade a standard Atari XF-551 to load and write in Ultraspeed. This means that all your disks will load approximately 6 times faster than a normal XF-551. Klaus Peters already made such an upgrade for the 1050 a few years ago. That upgrade was called a speedy, so he calls this upgrade the XF speedy. The kit consists of two printed boards, which are quite big, and a small switch. The printed boards replaces the CPU of the disk-drive. Because the CPU is soldered into the board of the drive, you have to solder it out and replace it with a socket. After that you also have to remove the ROM of the XF-551 drive and a small wire, which was not included, must be connected to one of the pins of the I/O socket. Last but not least, the small switch must be glued into the drive-mechanism. TML of ANG-software fitted this upgrade into my drive and he thinks that fitting this upgrade into the drive is far too difficult for people without soldering-experience. The manufacturer claims that the XF speedy is 100% compatible with the 1050 speedy. So lets take a look. I tested the speedy with several disks. All programmes which switch to Ultraspeed automatically are loading much faster than normally. When you own the Q-meg operating system the fun really starts. All disks will load and save in Ultraspeed. Also the disks which were made with standard drives. There is only one little problem: the density. A standard 1050 checks the density of the inserted disk when you close the drive latch. The XF does not have that feature. That is why you have to glue a switch into the drive mechanism. This switch will take care of this problem. Now when you close the drive latch the XF will also check the density. The only drawback of this solution is that I wonder if the switch will stay at its place. Back to the compatibility. There are several programmes available for the 1050 speedy to copy protected software. Examples of these programmes are Ultra Copier and MS copy. Klaus Peters has informed ANG that MS copy will be updated to work with the XF speedy. So I already knew that MS copy would not work so I tried to run Ultra Copier. The disk loaded perfectly, but when I tried to copy a disk the XF speedy crashed completely. The drive-busy light stayed on while the motor was not running. The only way to get the XF speedy running again was to switch the drive off. So Ultra Copier didn't run either. Together with the 1050 speedy you'll receive a disk with copiers and utilities which will work with the speedy. The disk loaded perfectly but that cannot be said of the programmes. One of the three copiers, namely Backup, does not work with the XF speedy. Fortunately the other two copiers, HSS copy and Copy 2000, work perfectly. It is the same story with the utlities. The utilities which test the speedy are working fine, but the utility to slow down the speedy will crash the speedy. Everything seems to work perfectly but when you load a disk the first sectors are read and then a very strange sound comes out of the drive. The drive will not load any further. But why slow down the drive? Some protected disks will not load in Ultraspeed. When you slow down the drive, the drive will simulate a standard drive and load all protected disks. An explanation of these problems might be that the disk, which you receive with the 1050 speedy, is specially made for the 1050 speedy. The XF speedy does not come with any disk because the necessary programmes are stored in ROM. When you boot your system with the drive latch open you will automatically see a menu. In this menu you can slow down the drive and load a copier (copy 2000). Also a DOS is included in ROM, namely Bibodos. The slow down option in this menu works perfectly. All protected disks will load and run, but there is one exception: the original Polish version of Operation Blood (the ANG-version loads perfectly). After some while it was clear to me that the XF speedy simulates a 1050 drive. The XF drive was always very quiet, but now the drive makes the same noise as the 1050 when the read/write head is moving. An advantage of this is that the drive now runs disks which did not run on a standard XF-551. Examples are Boulderdash 2 and the original Polish version of Inside. Also the problems of the index hole have been dissappeared. The disk can now be formatted at both sides without the need of a second index hole. According to the manual the XF speedy can also read and write in quad density format (360K). This is a feature of the standard XF-551 drive. I still have not managed to format a disk in quad density with the XF-speedy, but the speedy does recognize the format. It is strange that the built-in DOS, Bibodos, does not have the option to format in quad density. I had expected that such option was provided. The conclusion of TML is that this upgrade is far from perfection. The kit is very big and is not very stabil. Also the price of DM 179, which is about 65-70 pounds, is very high and the upgrade can not be fitted by a unexperienced solderer. The upgrade is also NOT 100% compatible with the 1050 speedy. I agree with him. This kit gives mainly the advantage of reading and writing at a much higher speed. It will make your drive more compatible but the price which must be paid for these advantages is very high.