Re: LZ: ?s about ram expander!

Subject: Re: LZ: ?s about ram expander!
From: site <site@xnet.com>
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 1996 21:25:13 -0500 (CDT)
In-Reply-To: <199610152235.AAA01117@defiant.rbk.sollentuna.se>

See, you can't feasiblly make the ram any bigger.  There is only so much 
address space (much like there is a 1 meg cap for our PCs) How then do we 
have 16 or 32 or whatever mb RAM, well it uses a very similar tequnique 
that TI used to get 128k ROM.  Page swapping.  It swaps pages of stuff 
into or outof that address space.  Now, there is no way that us mere 
mortals are going to do that through the link port.  Sorry.  So what will 
(I hope) be done is that a set of functions will be written to read and 
write data.  I hope that the new ZShell comes out soon so that libraries 
may be used.  This would enable, among other things, for a standard RAM 
extender function set to be used.  It would be useful if the actuall OS 
(Zshell) handled the expansion kit and then could put the actuall 
programs into mem to run, and also provide routines for a game to read 
bitmaps or whatever from the outside memory directlly.  This would 
require collaboration between the two groups, and I don't know what will 
happen.  Whoever does write the functions I hope does a complete job.  I 
would be interested to see how they tackle the problem of fragmentation.  
(This concept was touched on in a few other messages, but for thoose who 
don't know, it's just like hard drive fragmentation).  We will see what 
happens.  


Site's site: http://www.xnet.com/~site

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Re: LZ: ?s about ram expander!

From: Zenon Lynx <Zenon@bbs.nexes.com>