How-to achieve maximum performance with the Zip drive and DTR-1

Here are some steps to increase the speed of the Zip drive with your Dauphin DTR-1.

1. Make sure it is installed properly! You cannot just have guest.exe for the suggestions below. Load GUEST.EXE to access your drive and properly install the drive from the DOSSTUFF directory on the ZIPTOOLS ZipDisk. When this is complete, you will have a bunch of SCSI drivers in your config.sys. Yes, SCSI drivers with the parallel drive. A driver is loaded to make the parallel drive act like a SCSI device. Now edit your autoexec.bat and take out the guest.exe line.

2. Edit your config.sys file and change the line where the text string nibble.ilm is found to byte.ilm. The OPTPPM1 program does not correctly detect and optimize the bidirecitonal parallel port of the DTR-1. This will nearly double your speed right here.

3. If you haven't done so already, snag the DOS 6.22 step-up from www.microsoft.com's software library. Now type SCSIUTIL and the Dos prompt and make your zip disk that we are going to compress unremovable (ie, locked). Now type DRVSPACE at the dos prompt and elect to compress your Zip drive. Note compression is not possible with guest.exe. After the hour or two of compressing it, the speed on your zip disk will almost double once more, depending on the compression ratio. Check this with a DIR /C. I have found Drivespace to be a very reliable and fast method of compression, much better than any version of Stacker. You can uncompress your Zip Disk later if you want.

Now your Zip disk is about 4x faster than it used to be. Enjoy.