[Coco] MyRam vs, Rammer

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 12 May 2019 06:03:16 pm L. Curtis Boyle wrote:

> There are two pluses in the RAMMER column (at least in the bug fix
> version in EOU Beta 4) - since it mimics “real”  drive geometry
> (number of sides, sectors per track, tracks), it works with the BACKUP
> command (so you can back up real floppies in 1 pass to either
> direction. It also supports the special /MD descriptor (“memory
> descriptor”) for debugging. This lets you both view and modify memory
> anywhere in the 2 MB while the system is running. Not for the casual
> user, but very helpful for testing special cases, error trapping, etc.

ISTR I did test it with backup, backing up a 720k floppy and going both 
ways for 2 identical floppy's as a result. Maybe I did something to muck 
that up in the final version? Or bit rot has set in in the copies in the 
repo.

But I'm out of system ram and can't format a floppy. That makes things 
like this a bit difficult to troubleshoot at this late date.

> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On May 12, 2019, at 3:04 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at shentel.net> 
wrote:
> >> On Sunday 12 May 2019 03:33:08 pm coco at jechar.ca wrote:
> >>
> >>  What are the pros and cons of MyRam vs Rammer for 512K and 2 Meg
> >> systems ?
> >>
> >>  Charlie.
> >
> > From the author of MyRam, not a lot for a 512k system, although
> > bringing it into existence, just access it by any handy command,
> > like a "dir /r0" and it will be formatted and ready to use in about
> > 100 milliseconds and a deiniz /r0 it when done to demolish it and
> > get every byte back for other uses may still be an advantage.  See
> > my README for how to adjust its size in 8 kb chunks. I've used it
> > for c compiler scratchpad set for 1.7 megabytes on my 2 meg machine,
> > probably at least a thousand times. If you don't have a hard drive,
> > it will speed up a compile thats using a floppy for scratchpad a
> > very noticeable amount. With scsi hard drives, and probably even the
> > ide drives, it won't be noticeably faster because the drive is not
> > the speed limit, the coco is. It takes 11 seconds for the coco3 to
> > move a megabyte.  Thats slow considering modern SSD's with a sata
> > interface on a slow atom cpu are doing 120+ megs/second these days.
> >
> > example from one of my machine controller boxes, with a 1.4GHz dual
> > core atom cpu:
> > gene at shop:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda1
> > [sudo] password for gene:
> >
> > /dev/sda1:
> > Timing cached reads:   1808 MB in  2.00 seconds = 904.15 MB/sec
> > Timing buffered disk reads: 368 MB in  3.00 seconds = 122.58 MB/sec
> > gene at shop:~$
> > And thats slow, another machine with more butterfly's in the cpu is
> > doing 192 for that last figure.
> >
> > Cheers, Gene Heskett
> > --
> > "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
> > soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> > -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> > Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Coco mailing list
> > Coco at maltedmedia.com
> > https://pairlist5.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/coco


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>