ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)

[joetee]

Thank you for making yet another great idea, for a great computer: and keep it go/growing!

[joetee]

I cant to wait to play with this card:  Mounting similar geometry disk/Bernoulli partitions on it and disk-copying HD partitions to it - then optimizing them in solid state - then disk-copying them back.  Auto booting from a RAD based Sys: should be quite fast too!
I did all of the above with using a DKB 2632 and with Phase5 boards a decade ago and its cool and fast as freaking blit!  (Thanks Dean and Wolf!)

Since its Zorro3, I know it should work in a Zorro2 system, but I'm curious:  The AutoConfig (TM) of RAM should count up to 8MB of the 128 MB - will there be a hack to use the rest of the SDRAM as some sort of virtual SSD(s)?  8MB is overkill in size for a blazing fast Sys: partition anyway!

[joetee]

I think he might have meant if it were a Zorro II card, that it should work in a Zorro III slot. That would be a logical assumption, but not the other way around. Else why have different standards?  :lol:

@Joetee... are you talking about BigWolf out East? Is he still selling Miggy stuff I wonder?

The Wolf I was thanking is Mr. Wolf Dietrich of Phase5 (& Gerald Carda Too!).
I just wanted to give my compliment to the designers of products that have most impressed me.  AmigaOS's RAD: has saved thousands of developers a ton of time!

The only thing faster re-booting from RAD: is Umithlon, using RAD: but I guess thats cheating since thats from a CtrlAmigaAmiga "soft boot" (after Umithlon booted Linux from the HDD to run the emulator SW first) not cold, from a true HW reset.  Thats why it only takes 3 seconds...

RAD: is faster because booting from the south-bridge HW is skipped, and the North-bridge HW is faster and ready to go.

I'll check my BigRAM32 developer notes, but since this an Amiga design, almost everything is forward and backwards compatible.  An Amiga Z3 bus should tolerate any Z2 card - even though I/O to/from the PIC will slow the Z3 traffic way down.

I'm sorry I even mentioned alternative uses for it - I just know that most every piece of Commodore/Amiga/3rd party HW ever made has had soft&hardware hacks added to it after it was sold in original specification form.
....especially if it has EEPROM/CPLD/FPGA's on it!*  
 I should not have wondered on-line about using ZorRAM as a ramdisk for Z2 systems.
I have always considered it rude, and in poor form, for a hardware person who is not (currently) offering any products to inject there own features into another's product, or to assume that they know better than the one who is actually prototyping a product NOW, to sell tomorrow.  In fact, I was flat out wrong to wonder about using its memory as a RAD:, because it has to configure as vanilla RAM to ever even mount a file-system geometry of blocks into it.

 I VERY MUCH appreciate anyone who continues innovate Amiga products, and I vote with my wallet: I'm going to buy at least two ZorRAMs, and I will gladly pre-order them to satiate the developers' bean-counters in the mean time.

*Providing a 10 pin J-TAG port on HW products is VERY SEXY!