Dilwyn Jones wrote, on 11/Jan/11 13:29 | Jan11:
Rich Mellor wrote, on 11/Jan/11 12:13 | Jan11:
<snip>
after all, Miracle's hard disk did
still allow use of a ROM cartridge (from memory) although I may
be wrong
there.
It did. I remember he had designed it around the std eprom pack,
and I
had to file the case to fit a full width romdisq card.
Tony
Speaking of the romdisq, I wonder how practical it might be to
adapt the
romdisq drivers for Peter's card reader? I appreciate that (a) TT
would
probably charge for this, and (b) it might conflict with Peter's
"Open
Source" principles.
"Card reader" - I didn't read in detail, but will it be read only?
I assumed read/write.
Sorry, my mistake, I didn't mean to imply read-only. I should have
used Peter's terminology.
Romdisq auto-load drivers will not fit in an unexpanded QL. I
believe he needed quite a large data buffer in ram, certainly, I
would have thought, at least one 64kB block. I have no
documentation for TTs driver code.
It did strike me that Peter's hope to use it in a std QL might not
be straightforward. Even if the drivers fit, will there be enough
memory left to do anything useful?
128K QL... original QL disk interfaces only just about managed to work
in 128K with software like Quill, etc with the disk drivers in ROM and
what buffer area was needed in RAM etc. We might have to expect it to
only work on expanded memory systems (which the SGC PAR port version
would be anyway).
==> To Derek and Dilwyn: I think we can speak franky, now that a
native filesystem seems in reach. If you have comments, please go
ahead.
OK, with Peter's permission I can now say that I used a very early
prototype PAR port version from Peter for a while now. I wrote a
pointer driven front end for the MTools software (called MTFE for
MTools Front End) which allowed the use of the MTools commands, but in
a more comfortable pointer driven program. The files were stored in
the FAT formatted flash memory card (I hope I'm right in saying it was
FAT formatted, I can't remember!), to the best of my knowledge it was
never a QL native format at that stage, although with luck Peter's new
drivers will be able to implement a native QL file format. The
prototype worked well (and continues to do so after the time I have
had it).
The interface was a small black box with nicely rounded corners,about
5cm wide, 4cm deep and 1cm thick, but it was an early prototype and
Peter's ideas may have changed since then. About 40cm of cable
connected it to a 25-pin PC style PAR port connector, long enough to
put the interface where you want it (including under a QL out of sight
if the QL is raised by its plastic feet). I used it with my
Aurora-based Minis-QL, which has the SGC PAR port connected to the
outside world via a 25 pin D connector. I use a 256MB SD card but have
no reason to think you couldn't use a bigger capacity card up to what
the file format supports.
I certainly hope this QL add-on makes it to market as it provides a
good solution for future QL mass storage.
Dilwyn Jones
_______________________________________________
QL-Users Mailing List
http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
