Re: LZ: I think I have a definite plan for memory... I think...
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According to Mel Tsai:
>
>A 4.77 Mhz 8088 is actually more powerful than a 6 Mhz Z80, but that
>doesn't matter. Remember, the original IBM's had a lot of overhead to
>deal with. They had to coordinate interrupts, DMA, video, DRAM
>refresh, disk access, error correction and a host of other things.
>Those original modems didn't have very good error correction, and they
>had no compression. They were pretty much "dumb", and it took some
>work to interface a "fast" modem such as a 2400 baud to interface to
>it. The TI-85 has *no* overhead (accept for screen refresh), and
>therefore the transferr rate will be greatly increased.
>
Quite true... but even serial had more than two wires to work off of. But
you have a very good point. Something I might have forgotten.
>
>The file fragmentation won't be as complicated as you think... It
>will be pretty fast, probably much faster than regular calculator to
>calculator linking. I'm estimating anywhere from 1 to 5 kilobytes per
>second. Searching through the entire 512k or 1024k won't take more
>than two or three seconds!! Of course, you can't read every byte in
>that time span, but you can get all the file header information. You
>can read or write bytes to the expander pretty much randomly, but the
>problem arises when you want to erase something. This really won't
>mattter, however, as it will all be handled in the background.
>
This sounds good. Keep going and let me know!
>The software interface won't be more than 2 to 3 k in size, and for
>now it will be used just as a file storage/retrieval system. I'm
>thinking of making two versions, one with a whole bunch of "bells and
>whistles" and another "lite" version with functionality but 50 - 75%
>smaller. It will be a while before any other program physically
>accesses the expander, although I'll release all the vital
>send/receive routines soon.
>
This also sounds good. Almost like a floppy drive... PC's ran programs off
floppy drives for 10 years :)
C ya,
Ryan Myers ( rmyers@teleport.com )
http://www.teleport.com/~rmyers/
"Canthus" or "Darren" on DARKWORLD / Twisted Fate
C> Warning: REALITY.SYS may be corrupt. Reboot universe(y/n)?
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