## Review: Crossdos 6 Pro By Consultron

### By: Jason Compton

You're really supposed to wait until the end of a review to summarize your opinion on a product. But I just can't wait to say it.

If you don't have CrossDos on your system already (i.e. if you don't have a high enough Workbench version or you haven't purchased it), please, do yourself a favor and pick up CrossDos 6 Pro. If you already have CrossDos, you'll be doing yourself a smaller favor by getting CrossDos 6 Pro, since you'll get faster disk accesses and enhanced support for emulators and hard drive formatting. You'll need OS 2.0 or better to make it work, incidentally.

There. I'm done. Although I suppose I should justify the above statements...

CrossDos 6 Pro is the latest installment in the long-running commercial MS-DOS format disk filesystem for the Amiga. It's been around for quite some time, and was so tremendously useful Commodore licensed it for use in recent versions of the Amiga operating system. You didn't get all of the niceties, but you got some usable support for floppies and hard drives.

One of the things you didn't get, thankfully, was the "nice try, but not very useful" CrossPC IBM XT emulator (formerly known as IBeM, licensed by Consultron.) Back in the days of PC-Task 1.0, IBeM was a worthy challenger. But with PC-Task 2.0 and enhanced graphic support as well as a reasonable user interface, IBeM's usefulness was fading fast. PC-Task 3 makes IBeM look silly, and Consultron hacked it out of the package and cut the price of the CrossDos 6 package as a result.

CrossDos gives you transparent access to MS-DOS (and Atari ST, since it's the same format) floppies and hard drives on your Amiga. Floppy support is provided through a simple DEVS: attachment, PCx: (x being 0, 1, 2, 3). When a PC floppy is inserted in DF0:, PC0: accesses it. (There are utilities that purport to unify PC0: and DF0:, meaning you don't have to deal with "Not a DOS disk in DF0:" if you accidentally choose it instead of PC0:) Real PC hard drives (or Bernoulli/Syquest cartridges) can be accessed by CrossDos' straightforward setup system.

Has access speed improved? Yes, and high density owners will rejoice. High density access used to be a horrifying experience, with the already slow high density drive slowed even more by the CrossDos transfer speed. It's still nothing to get excited about, but it's an improvement. Hard drive access purports to be up to ten times faster. I don't trust device speed testing programs. Suffice it to say, it's somewhat faster.

One nice and useful feature for emulator owners is the ability to create an "image" of a real MS-DOS hard drive on an otherwise AmigaDOS drive, either as a partition or a file-drive. In other words, if you've got a hankering to transfer a useful collection of PC software for use on PC-Task or Emplant PC, CrossDos steps in, copies everything over for you and makes it accessable. At the same time, this means that existing partition or file-drive users can access their software through the Amiga file system. Given that most useful PC file management software is either not as good as the Amiga alternative or is far too slow to be useful on most emulator systems, having this sort of transparent file access for copying files and such is a great boon.

I'm happy. I'm glad CrossDos has hit this high, and I'm happy Consultron is still around to tell us about it.

See above for my summary.

Consultron
8959 Ridge Road
Plymouth, MI 48170-3213
313-459-7271