[A83] Re: Stupid Idea?
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[A83] Re: Stupid Idea?
At 07:01 PM 12/14/2002 +0100, you wrote:
>Why not use a floppy drive?
>Easy to carry medium, 2 MB (well, that's max) on one floppy, and if you use
>fat (at the expense of 560 KB) you can even use the floppy in your PC!
And the speed hit wouldn't be limited to the link port! But seriously,
that's cool because people have a couple spare floppy drive around (or at
least I do) and the disks are almost free. Now comes the issue of building
an interface device between the link port and the floppy controller (and
the floppy controller, possibly, because they are hard to come by not
attached to a mobo) I still think that the interface should be a seperate
device, to optimize on what gets sent to the calc (like just
filenames/indexes, not the full FAT) I don't know how hard floppy control
protocols are, but the device might be built to handle floppy driving and
FAT interpretation, and then communicate with an ASM program on the
calc. You'd still have a limit on program size of calc mem minus the
linking program, but you could add lib functions that would allow you to
grab data archives from the disk (so you'd have an area of data in the game
for the first level, and when you go to level 2, you display 'loading' and
overwrite that data with the next level data from the disk using the lib
call) This provides advantages in having only the data you need at the
moment taking up memory, so a large RPG like Narkeman would not be a
full-calc exercise.
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