PCMCIA flashram...which one?

[SKAN]

Hi guys, need some help here...
I wanna buy a PCMCIA flashcard for my A1200, let's say 64mb at least. I wanna store some quick access things and other stuff, but since I wanna boot exec v44.1 from there to reduce boot time, do you know if it's possible?

[Matt_H]

It's not possible to boot from a PCMCIA device that size, and the transfer speeds over the PCMCIA port are really not all that great. I think a hard drive would be faster to boot from.

The ROM-resident C= carddisk.device only supports RAM (not Flash) cards up to 4MB. The excellent cfd.lha package on Aminet gives you a new device that can be used to read modern card formats, but it's a software-only DOSDriver, and isn't bootable. If you could somehow make the DOSDriver, associated .device, and filesystem reset-resident, then you could probably boot from it. That would require an initial bootup, however. Or the FlashROM of an Algor, Kickflash, or eFlash.

Another possibility is to create a boot floppy that mounts CF0: (the cfd.lha DOSDriver) and then reassigns the system to it to boot up. I did this before I had a hard drive in my A600. There is no speed benefit to this, however. But it is fun :-)

[Doobrey]

Matt_H wrote:
 If you could somehow make the DOSDriver, associated .device, and filesystem reset-resident, then you could probably boot from it. That would require an initial bootup, however. Or the FlashROM of an Algor, Kickflash, or eFlash.

But if you`ve got a flashrom board, why not just boot exec44 from that instead of loading newer a newer card resource and then booting from the flash it mounts ??

BTW, just a brain fart.. but can you use a PCMCIA flash card as a disk instead of memory?
 Didn`t the old Psion SRAM cards work on the amiga too? they go pretty cheap on ebay these days.
 Even 2Mb should be plenty.. I`m struggling to fill 1Mb, and thats with all 3.9 updates, IDEFix and Poseidon ...

[Hyperspeed]

If you want fast solid-state disk access on the PCMCIA port you could
try those old battery-backed PCMCIA Mitsubishi Melcard. They come in
2mb size I think but there may be 4mb ones.

Usually battery backed SRAM is too slow as memory (100ns is the
fastest) but makes super-fast disk storage. PCMCIA won't allow a great
transfer rate but no doubt seek time would be practically zero.

According to Tools/PrepCard there is some way to get 64mb by using 2mb
in 32x `units'. Quite what this means I don't know.

You have to consider that should the button-battery die then your
files will also disappear.

A more novel option might be to put a Squirrel SCSI interface on the
PCMCIA port and use a SCSI card reader. Buy some Compact Flash cards
or whichever ones your reader uses and format it like a hard disk!

:-)

You can also have 7x of these with SCSI... or if you like have an IDE
card reader.

[SKAN]

OK, I can live without flashram boot and still have my double-booting v44.1 system, but:

1. Can I use a PCMCIA compactflash adapter and a 64mb CF card as a fast hdd? I want to play TotalChaos from there, since this game accesses th hd continously and that's not so sexy... (I think there's a tool on aminet allowing this...It was born for digital cameras users anyway...)

2. Does an internal flashram solution exist for the poor A1200? eFlash 1200 has disappeared and I don't wanna towerize my good old Miggy... :-D

[lordv]

1. Can I use a PCMCIA compactflash adapter and a 64mb CF card as a fast hdd? I want to play TotalChaos from there, since this game accesses th hd continously and that's not so sexy... (I think there's a tool on aminet allowing this...It was born for digital cameras users anyway...)

Right! On aminet there is a nice driver for such funny cards, called compactflash.device - specially for such adapters.

The only problem: it isn't really that fast, AND - you have to use FAT16 system. I've tried to mount PFS on such a card, but some problems arise... I don't know what is it, but I'll try FFS and SFS as well.

A little hint: PFS needs correct hicyl/lowcyl/etc, you can learn it using CheckDisk from aminet.

[Hyperspeed]

You can buy internal SiliconTech drives for the IDE interface on the
A1200. They are almost wafer-thin solid-state flash drives and work on
IDE. They just screw into the cradle and give you 800mb of permanent,
non-volatile disk space.

Also, it's worth trying my Squirrel -> SCSI card reader idea too.
There is info on Aminet how to use a SCSI card reader as a drive.

If you use a SCSI one it might get 3mb/s and with very low seek times,
no noise or heat and ever lasting!

:-D

Also, if you just have a spare 64mb Compact Flash card, you can buy
simple IDE->Compact Flash adaptors that allow you to put your Compact
Flash card into the A1200's IDE port. Simple as that. Probably looks
like a small lego block or something.

;-)

[Doobrey]

SKAN wrote:
2. Does an internal flashram solution exist for the poor A1200? eFlash 1200 has disappeared and I don't wanna towerize my good old Miggy... :-D

Watch this space... :sealed:

[Matt_H]

@ Doobrey

Sounds interesting! :-)
Something on the clockport, maybe? I've read that was one of its intended uses from the original design...

[SKAN]

These ones look fine...
http://www.magicram.com/dataflash.htm

[Doobrey]

@Matt_H
 Nope, the clockport can only address 32 bytes (16 per select line), although I`ve planned a 4x clockport splitter to go in the design, just cos I needed some more i/o for another project.

 The clockport is part of a header that was originally left over from the time when CBM were gonna build a 1mb A1200, with a plugin board for another 1mb.

 There were designs for an optional 256kb flash rom in the early A1200 schematics, but they changed their minds and cut it out in the end versions  :pissed:
 To make it worse, I`ve been told Phase 5 used the address space CBM reserved for the flash, for the roms of their accelerator cards instead of using the autoconfig method. (My CS MK2 does, I haven`t got a Blizzard to test)

[SKAN]

MagicRam's microIDE flashdisks looks really fine, seriously considering buy some...

Does anyone know if battery powered SRAM PC cards (Let's say 2Mb max) are useful for booting?