Re: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!


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Re: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!




I think an easier way to store on the disk (just a possibility) would be to possibly just have the calc store on the disk in a differant format, rather than trying to emulate IBM/Macintosh/etc.  Then you could just have a program on the computer to convert between the TI format and the computer format.  The hard part would be you couldn't just add programs to the floppy-you'd have to add them on through the decoder/encoder.  But it could save some space/time/etc.

-Peter

Christopher Kalos wrote:

> here's the deal, I think it can be done.  The deal is that the floppy drive interface is not parallel, it's serial.  That results in a drastically simplified system.  However, reading a disk all the time is very difficult.  There was a proposal a while back to use a 2MB memory chip to buffer the entire disk, but that's somewhat impractical.  what we can do is read the FAT onto a memory chip.  It would be smaller, and we could even use an EEPROM.  The one that Bryan used in the EuP was supposed to be usable forever, but you would have to refresh the entire array every so often.  If we get a lower density version of that chip, we're set, since the array is reset everytime you change disks!
>         To continue, what needs to be added in is something like cal or the graphlink software on a chip.  It receives data from the link port and saves it in standard .8xx format.  It's still complex, but doable.  there are a lot of control pins for the drives, so it's something to think about.
>         However, I'm not about to call it quits on this project.  What we need then is that the calculator itself must decode the data, so there has to be a bypass from the AVR, so that we can avoid killing the AVR memory.  Or we could do PCMCIA conversion (still tougher), and connect any standardized device.
> Christopher Kalos
> raptorone@stuytech.com
> Executive Director/Administrator
> Virtual Technologies Developer's Group
>
> ----------
> From:   Grant Stockly[SMTP:gussie@alaska.net]
> Sent:   Saturday, January 17, 1998 8:27 PM
> To:     ti-hardware@lists.ticalc.org
> Subject:        RE: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!
>
> >well, the deal (yet again)  is power, and that blasted link port.  maybe
> >with an AVR (is there an echo out here?), it will work.
>
> Power and...valuable time!  It would take a year or half to get it working!
>
> It would work with the 4414 AVR.  I looked into it, but as I think, flash
> is the way to go.
>
> Grant
>
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