[Coco] 1 or 2 meg upgrade

[Bill Pierce]

Aaron, graphic screens, get/put buffers, fonts, pointers, patterns,ramdisks, windows, all live "out" of the 64k workspace and out of the 64k system space. Not to mention more processes can be run simultainiously, who needs more than 521k? Anyone using os9, that's who.
What you're not realizing (or thinking about), is that the system will automatically use the ram if it's there.
When I had a 512k machine, I was always having to be carefull of how many text editors I opened, or if I had enough ram to run a graphics program with all I had running at the moment. With my 1 meg Coco 3, and the Vcc set at 2 meg, I do not even think about it. I just do it.
Who needs more than 512k?, that reminds me of Bill Gates saying no one would ever need more than 64k of memory.
 

Bill Pierce
"Today is a good day... I woke up" - Ritchie Havens
 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Wolfe <aawolfe at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Fri, Nov 21, 2014 10:55 pm
Subject: Re: [Coco] 1 or 2 meg upgrade


On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 10:27 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> On Friday 21 November 2014 15:43:31 Nick Marentes did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>> On 22/11/2014 6:35 AM, Josh Harper via Coco wrote:
>> >   hi guys
>> >
>> > I was just wondering how hard it would be to copy the 1 or 2 meg
>> > memory upgrade boards from disto   as id love to have one of these
>> > myself thanks
>>
>> Would be nice to see Cloud9 release a 1/2Mb version of the triad.
>>
>> Nick
>
> The Triad is a 1/2 meg board, easy.  But to go to 2 megs you'll need to
> design a circuit that will add 2 more addressing lines to drive the memory
> mapping of the additional memory in 8k blocks.  One could carry that to
> its logical conclusion at 8 megs, which has been done but while it was
> described in the Rainbow, was not to my knowledge ever a commercially
> offered product.  One of the disto complexities was also the widening of
> the refresh counter, needed to deal with the square architecture of 99% of
> the memory sticks out there.  For 8 megs, the addressing IIRC expands to a
> full 24 bits, needing a 12 bit refresh driver, and thats 4 bits wider than
> the coco's built in dram refresh counter.
>

When evaluating whether it's worth all the effort required to extend
beyond 512k, one should really consider why more than 512k would be of
any use on a CoCo.
There isn't any software to actually use this extra RAM besides RAM
disks, and RAM disks aren't all that useful in a world where we have
near zero seek time mass storage like the SuperIDE or CoCoSDC
controllers.  OS9 could theoretically use > 512k, but in practice
you'll usually run out of system resources and/or things to do before
that happens.

$0.02
-Aaron

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