[Coco] Christmas Wish Device

[John W. Linville]

On Wed, Dec 07, 2011 at 03:26:32PM -0500, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> Sorry if I'm being dense (its a specialty of mine), but what is the
> purpose of using compact flash etc as a "ramdisk" if you can already
> use it as a regular disk with actual decb and os9 commands?  And what
> is the purpose of having more than 512K of ram, if not to use it as a
> ram disk?
> 
> There is some possibility the superIDE could be used in the way
> desired, but I'm not sure.  You could certainly treat is as a linear
> blob of 256 byte sectors without a filesystem.

Which is, in fact, exactly how my video player uses it.

My interpretation is that the OP was hoping for a device that could
just "bank switch" the storage into memory and use it as if it were
a replacement for the DRAM.  CF (which is just IDE), SD, or no other
common "storage" technology is going to do that.

One could produce a device that included a big "NOR" flash device
(i.e. like what stores the BIOS on your PC) and have that bank-switched
into the CoCo's address range.  In fact, the SuperIDE already
allows for a form of that with it's support for multiple ROM images.
But I think the OP was hoping for something much bigger?  Anyway,
even this would only be good for "read only" (like ROM images)or
"read mostly" applications.  Using it for writing to storage would
require special code specific to the device in question.

Anyway, enough pontificating... :-)

John
-- 
John W. Linville		Someday the world will need a hero, and you
linville at tuxdriver.com			might be all we have.  Be ready.