Program loader speeds - why so different?

pmrobert

A little history, please bear with me. I am constructing a simple device to handle a simple chore, namely controlling the heater for a hot tub. The project box contains a Prop Project Board to which I accidentally placed a small drill bit directly into the mini USB socket and tore it off the board. Since I had a couple of other chips already mounted and working on the board (3208 ADC and a ULN2803 to power some relays), I didn't want to recreate things from scratch. I sourced a SerPlug from Bill Henning's mikronauts.com so as to bypass the FTDI chip. I use EditPlus and a couple of batch files to edit, compile and load PropBasic .eeprom files along with BSTC as the compiler and Propellent as the loader. Propellent failed about every other attempt to load so I tried propeller-load and BSTL. Propeller-load is 100% reliable but about 30-40% of the speed of Propellent (when Propellent works - it fails with a message "Propeller chip lost on COM7"). I like the progress messages and like the open source aspect of propeller-load. BSTL on the other hand is 100% reliable, twice as fast as Propellent is but gives no status report and is a dead end piece of work. I then thought that maybe it's the ATEN USB->serial->SerPlug->Prop chain that makes things different but I observe the same behavior with a QuickStart board using the standard onboard FTDI USB connection. I only checked into this because Propellent was failing as noted. So, I guess my question is - why the major difference? No complaints here, just curious. Also it would be great for OpenSpin to support @@@ so we could fully deprecate BST for all applications. Thanks to all of the gurus here, you help a lot of people and probably don't know the half of it....

-Mike

Edit: Win7-64 respectably equipped, no prior problems at all.