I don't know the guy from Adam, but I create one thread a year and he was shitting all over it. I'm sure he's a lovely person but he decided to whine loudly about off-topic things.

There is a lot of variation in speed when it comes to SD cards, and this must be down to access times. The Sony 8GB card I used a lot during development was a lot slower than - for example - a 32GB SanDisk card I tried later on during testing. The SanDisk could manage 64KB/s reads in RWTEST and 55KB/s writes no problem at all, which matches typical CF card speeds with SIDE2. YMMV.

AVG may have the edge as a stand-alone cart if you want ATR support and wire up the built-in SIO device. But if you're an U1MB owner (as Ryszard appears to be), you will miss out, because AVG cannot emulate SIDE2 and run carts at the same time. SIDE3 allows cart emulation, HDD partitions, and ATR mounting all in one device with U1MB, all from the same loader menu. OSS Action! with hard disk partitions and bootable ATRs? No problem. Sure: AVG is cheaper and the SIO emulation is pretty killer if you want to move the cart from one machine to another, but for those already invested in U1MB or thinking of purchasing U1MB, SIDE3 is a more integrated solution.

There's nothing to see. It's external in the sense it's not installed in any computer. :) It was funnier in the pub.

SIDE3 loader already has malware detection which no-one commented on, which suggests no-one even tried to run the malicious software in the first place. LOL.

The reason none of this is available yet is since both plugins require changes to the base firmware, and since the firmware targets several different platforms, the changes take time. Incognito is also getting plugins now (thus PokeyMAX and Sophia2 support, etc, but a CPLD update is needed), so I have my plate full coding this up without causing breakages. I'm about half way done now, and I have a machine sitting on the desk whose owner wants the plugins pre-installed on before it's returned, so believe me, I am as keen to see this completed as you are.

Misleading. The the problems I observe are wholly reproducible with Candle's original firmware, and updating changes nothing, except revealing the fact that the VBXE core version is sometimes unreadable when Rapidus is present.

Hmmm. Like the UK. The Public Health Act dates from 1984 (LOL), and is only now being used by the government to completely destroy the country.

Ad hominem insults are always the first resort of someone with no real arguments. Generally they expose their own character via their behaviour without any help from anyone else. :)

I think Candle acknowledged the 'behaviour' of the hardware. You'll have to ask him why he didn't fix it in new devices. Wild guess? XXL's attitude has been so fucking obnoxious that the chance for a fix has been blown.

Already done, AFAIK, by Candle. XXL admits no issue, however, with his own stuff, so has not even broached that first step.

If you think it's fair to deliberately exploit a quirk of U1MB for no practical reason other than to make your software crash on the machine, I don't know what to say. I simply do not know what point is being made here, other than an ideological objection to a certain vendor or designer.

Certainly I can't understand why one would not fix a bug unless the well had already been poisoned by politics, which I think is what happened here.

Note that the U1MB CPLD side of things has nothing to do with me. I consider exploitation of the issue to be incredibly childish, however.

Possible. All I know of XXL's personality is what he projects on forums. In my experience, anyone who will go to these lengths will be hard to appease. It is not without precedent, either. He advocates illegal OS entry points, seems to consider 'NEWDEV' an aftermarket invention, and has an ethical objection to 16-bit CPUs. I would personally not be prepared to pander to someone with such complex needs. :)

Not worth bothering with for the sake of one piece of software which only has an issue because of a pointless contrivance.

AVG's SIDE emulation places the IDE registers at the exact same memory location as a real SIDE2 cart. So it's impossible to access both devices at the same time, no matter what changes are made to the driver.

I flash SIDE2 on U1MB machines all the time. Secret is to ensure U1MB ROMs are not in the way. So: turn off PBI HDD and SDX in U1MB settings, put SIDE2 in SDX mode, and power-cycle machine. SDX will boot from SIDE2 and you can then flash both SDX ROM and loader ROM as you wish.