[A83] Re: Stupid Idea?
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[A83] Re: Stupid Idea?
At 02:08 PM 12/14/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>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.
I did a quick Google search, and this might be interesting:
http://debs.future.easyspace.com/Programming/Hardware/FDC/floppy.html
I wish I could subscribe to TI-H, but this is the only list that I can get
to work.
References: