RE: Plucker and FAT32
--- Dennis McCunney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: clip I used to use Plucker on a Handspring Visor Pro, with a PiTech MemPlug CF adapter and a 256MB CF card. The PiTech VFS extensions were in firmware on the adapter, and activated when the card was inserted. The ROM on the MemPlug showed as a seperate card in FileZ. Same for the InnoPocket FlashPlus. (and other InnoPocket adapters for SmartMedia etc.) It has 1meg of FLASH RAM so the onboard apps could be updated. I think the problem Plucker, Mapopolis and Mobipocket have is they see that 1meg first and since it doesn't conform to the specs for a read/write Palm type memory card, they stop there instead of finding the memory card. So far those are the only three apps I've run into that have issues with how Kopsis Engineering did their VFS driver. Plucker worked just fine on the MemPlug. http://kopsisengineering.com/kopsis_cspotrun_src.zip There's the source code for CSpotRun that came with the InnoPocket memory adaptors. In the zip are two small files named flashadapter.c and flashadapter.h My bet is there's exactly the info needed to make Plucker work with InnoPocket's Springboard modules. What I'd like to see in Plucker is an option to manually select the onboard RAM or the card, and file management functions other than just Delete, so I could move and copy between the card and onboard RAM. (A Beam function would also be nice!) I usually use TealDoc to copy my Plucker documents to onboard RAM because it's easier than using FileZ or the FAFileMover that's on the InnoPocket adaptor. The InnoPocket FlashAdapter (without the onboard 1meg FLASH RAM) was based on Kopsis Engineering's discovery that the Springboard slot could be interfaced directly to Compact Flash simply by crossing wires to two pins and using the same socket used for PC Card to CF adapters. InnoPocket used that to design a compact version that allowed the CF card to fit flush with the Visor. To address the issue of using up onboard RAM with the apps etc required for interfacing the adaptor, they designed the FlashPlus. If the FLASH RAM somehow gets FUBARed, a FlashPlus (and presumably the models for other card types) may still work like the original FlashAdapter by loading all the drivers and apps into onboard RAM. (I don't think I'll try that just to see if Plucker and those other two apps will see the CF card. ;-) It will be total Fandemonium! August (Fri) 4th, (Sat) 5th (Sun) 6th, 2006 http://www.fandemonium.org __ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com ___ plucker-dev mailing list plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
Re: Plucker and FAT32
--- Dennis McCunney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: clip On the Palm Lifedrive, Palm implemented FAT32 file system support to handle the 4GB internal hard drive the Lifedrive uses. A programmer figured out how to patch the FAT32.PRC driver to get it to run on other devices, and instruction were available on another board for getting it installed on the Zodiac in place of the built-in FATFS driver. Among other incentives, the FAT32 driver has better performance reading FAT16 cards. I assume there's no chance that could be ported to a Handspring Visor Platinum with an InnoPocket FlashPlus springboard module? The problem there is that Plucker cannot see the Compact Flash card. (Nor can Mapopilus or Mobipocket.) TealDoc, FileZ and other apps have no problem. Some see the 1meg flash RAM on the FlashPlus as PalmCard 1, but cannot access it, and can access the CF card, which I finally managed to rename from NO NAME to 128meg. Someone was going to send me an experimental version of Plucker, but AFAIK it never showed up in this inbox, unless Yahoo Mail dumped it in the spam folder. It will be total Fandemonium! August (Fri) 4th, (Sat) 5th (Sun) 6th, 2006 http://www.fandemonium.org __ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com ___ plucker-dev mailing list plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
Re: Plucker and FAT32
One issue that I've noticed is that some filesystems require slashes in paths, while others tolerate backslashes. Moreover, some filesystems let you open a directory by giving a filename of the form /dir/ while others require you to omit the final slash. If memory serves, the LD is finicky. Plucker uses slashes but includes a trailing slash in dir names. I'll be sending Gregg a test version that doesn't include a trailing slash in dir names. ___ plucker-dev mailing list plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
RE: Plucker and FAT32
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Alexander R. Pruss Sent: Sunday, September 18, 2005 10:02 PM To: plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org Subject: Re: Plucker and FAT32 On Sun, 18 Sep 2005, Dennis McCunney wrote: On the Palm Lifedrive, Palm implemented FAT32 file system support to handle the 4GB internal hard drive the Lifedrive uses. A programmer figured out how to patch the FAT32.PRC driver to get it to run on other devices, and instruction were available on another board for getting it installed on the Zodiac in place of the built-in FATFS driver. Among other incentives, the FAT32 driver has better performance reading FAT16 cards. I think someone should write a VFS caching hack. Seconded! Though actually, the folks at Brayder Technologies (Jack Flash and Jack Sprat) went one better and implemented a virtual memory solution for Palm devices. You can have virtual memory up to 256MB -- it keeps a memory image on the card, and uses RAM as a cache to aid performance. It's still in beta, and reported performance varies depending upon just which device it's installed on, but the fact it's been done at all is fascinating. See http://www.brayder.com/memoryjack/ for details. I installed it, and verified the performance gains with VFSMark. Everything worked fine, *except* Plucker. I assume Plucker works fine on a real LifeDrive. As do I. I don't have a real Lifedrive, and can't confirm. My guess is that there is a volume label problem--what you said about the drive label changing is relevant (I don't think VOLUME.NAM is really the volume name--FAT16 at least used to have a special directory entry for the volume name). No, it is. VOLUME.NAM is a file containing the volume label displayed by applications like FileZ. When I edited that file to change the string to LEXAR MEDIA, amtching what the card used to be called, that's what showed as the name for the card. Plucker used to have trouble with devices that had two volumes with the same label or even one with an empty label. Maybe some vestige of the problem remains. I thought I had fixed this issue, but maybe not. For the record, after installing the FAT32 driver, the content of the VOLUME.NAM file contained non-ascii chars. That might also have been a problem. In any case, I can't really test this myself with the FAT32 driver, because I don't want to violate Palm's copyright by pirating their FAT32 driver. Understood. I just couldn't resist the urge to play with it and see what happened. And you would have to patch thier driver to get it to work in any case. Alex __ Dennis ___ plucker-dev mailing list plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
RE: Plucker and FAT32
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Gregg Eshelman Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 3:39 AM To: plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org Subject: Re: Plucker and FAT32 --- Dennis McCunney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: clip On the Palm Lifedrive, Palm implemented FAT32 file system support to handle the 4GB internal hard drive the Lifedrive uses. A programmer figured out how to patch the FAT32.PRC driver to get it to run on other devices, and instruction were available on another board for getting it installed on the Zodiac in place of the built-in FATFS driver. Among other incentives, the FAT32 driver has better performance reading FAT16 cards. I assume there's no chance that could be ported to a Handspring Visor Platinum with an InnoPocket FlashPlus springboard module? I very much doubt it. And I suspect it wouldn't help you if it was. Among other things, it's an OS5 driver, so it would take more than a bit of patching to get it to run. The problem there is that Plucker cannot see the Compact Flash card. (Nor can Mapopilus or Mobipocket.) TealDoc, FileZ and other apps have no problem. Some see the 1meg flash RAM on the FlashPlus as PalmCard 1, but cannot access it, and can access the CF card, which I finally managed to rename from NO NAME to 128meg. The basic problem is that the Visors ran OS 3.5. VFS didn't make it into real PalmOS till OS 4.0, so folks offering expansion cards had to roll their own VFS support. They didn't always get it exactly right. I used to use Plucker on a Handspring Visor Pro, with a PiTech MemPlug CF adapter and a 256MB CF card. The PiTech VFS extensions were in firmware on the adapter, and activated when the card was inserted. The ROM on the MemPlug showed as a seperate card in FileZ. Plucker worked just fine on the MemPlug. And I rejoiced when the update appeared that let you tell Plucker to only check for new documents when told to, rather than every start-up. Enumerating hundreds of Plucker docs in a directory on a CF card on a 33mhz device was time-consuming, even though I ran an overclocking utility that boosted the speed to 54mhz for selected applications. I currently have a couple of *thousand* Plucker documents on the SD card in my Zodiac, and Plucker handles them fine. Updates aren't all that slow, either, though the Zodiac *is* a 200 mhz device. WordSmith worked fine on the Pro, too, run from the card with documents stored on the card. The app that gave me fits was Palm Reader. It would read books stored on the card with no issues, but would crash and burn if I tried to categorize them. Palm Reader stores the diocument category in a two-byte filed *in* the document, and Palm Reader had to write the changed doc back to the card. That seems to be where it choked and died. I went around the issue of why that was a bad approach to categorizing with a Palm Digital Media staffer. As I recall, he was sympathetic, but such changes weren't high on the developer's priority list. He said Palm Reader worked fine on genuine Palm devices running OS4, they only used vanilla OS calls, andf there must be a problem with PiTech's VFS extensions.I said fine, but Palm Reader was the *only* app I had that had a problem, and Plucker, Wordsmith, WeaselReader, et al worked fine... __ Dennis ___ plucker-dev mailing list plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
Re: Plucker and FAT32
On Sun, 18 Sep 2005, Dennis McCunney wrote: On the Palm Lifedrive, Palm implemented FAT32 file system support to handle the 4GB internal hard drive the Lifedrive uses. A programmer figured out how to patch the FAT32.PRC driver to get it to run on other devices, and instruction were available on another board for getting it installed on the Zodiac in place of the built-in FATFS driver. Among other incentives, the FAT32 driver has better performance reading FAT16 cards. I think someone should write a VFS caching hack. I installed it, and verified the performance gains with VFSMark. Everything worked fine, *except* Plucker. I assume Plucker works fine on a real LifeDrive. My guess is that there is a volume label problem--what you said about the drive label changing is relevant (I don't think VOLUME.NAM is really the volume name--FAT16 at least used to have a special directory entry for the volume name). Plucker used to have trouble with devices that had two volumes with the same label or even one with an empty label. Maybe some vestige of the problem remains. I thought I had fixed this issue, but maybe not. In any case, I can't really test this myself with the FAT32 driver, because I don't want to violate Palm's copyright by pirating their FAT32 driver. Alex -- Dr. Alexander R. Pruss || e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Philosophy Department || online papers and home page: Georgetown University || www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85 Washington, DC 20057|| U.S.A. || - Philosophiam discimus non ut tantum sciamus, sed ut boni efficiamur. - Paul of Worczyn (1424) ___ plucker-dev mailing list plucker-dev@rubberchicken.org http://lists.rubberchicken.org/mailman/listinfo/plucker-dev
