TI-H: Comments on List, and other things...(Please read.)


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TI-H: Comments on List, and other things...(Please read.)




[NOTE: A copy of the message was sent to the list, and Grant Stockly.]

> People don't like Wintel cos of speed, they like it cos of SOFTWARE!!!  Face
> it, the Mac and Apple are pretty much dead.  Even Big Blue is gonna tank
> sooner or later.  What will be left??? A split-up Microsoft and Intel, and
> smaller companies with good marketing and good business sense, like Dell and
> Compaq.  (Note the absence of Gateway, they don't have good business sense.
> Dell sold servers to companies at a much higher profit ratio than Gateway's
> sales of higher end PCs, probably the smallest fraction of the PC market.)
> 
> Rob

	Agreed. To the Die Hard Mac users (read: Grant). Apple is dying. Their
market share is quickly dwindling, with the final blow to Apple being
3rd party developers are quickly exiting stage left, and running for
the  doors. No companies are activly developing for the Apple Macs
alone. Most 'important' companies (read: Game companies and Office
software companies) are no longer considering the Mac as a viable
platform for development, and if Mac versions of games are made, they
are ported by a  development house that strictly ports software. Speed
of the processor is irrelevant. I've used this rationalization with
several people: The speed of the proc. is virtually invisiable, the true
visiable speed of the computer is in the video card.

	Now, to the subject of this list. With 3494 in my TI-H folder. (first
message is dated 4/17/98) I find this mailing list intriguing. It is
filled with Mac/PC wars, and seems to have lost sight of its topic. I
admit, I've fueled the fire on off topic discussions, but it seems that
is what this list is mainly consisted of. Most projects proposed are of
either impractibility, or unnecessary. The most fruitful discussion on
this list I've seen is the internal memory expansion.  

	To this specific line of discussion, not only is this idea highly
impractical, it is also unnecessary. The benifit of adding USB support
to the TI-8x is minimal at best, and truely non-existant.

	To Grant Stockly in specific. If you would be so inclined to focus your
ability towards hardware projects to the greater good of the TI-8x
calculators. The portable MP3 player is a great idea, and as I figured,
you are using a MPEG decoder chip. There is no great mystery to how a
MP3 decoder could be made with a premade chip. An internal memory
expansion would be a good project for you. An idea on how this could be
accomplished is as follows. I do not know the intimate workings of the
TI-8x, but here is my idea. Take the exisiting memory chip out, add a
memory manager chip ('mmc') in its place, make a small pcb with 256KB
RAM, page bank the RAM so the proc could only access the max. amount it
can map internally. (32KB I belive) You would need to modify the ROMS
(The most empty page) and add calls to the mmc so it could handle the
virtual maping. The mmc could swap banks as needed. Or, the mmc could be
in a default page (page 0) and only programs specifically written to use
the added functionality would be able to access the additional RAM. The
second idea would require a shell with the ability to access the link
port, while inside the ASM shell, and a port for the mmc and shell to
access information such as current page, etc. This is feasible and
practicle, but quite diffacult. I have neither the time, nor the ability
to undertake such a project, but with your ability, a project such as
this would only take you a few months. 

Thanks for reading my long post. :)
Adam


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