Possible new hardware project

[Terence J. Boldt <apple2@cgocable.net>]

Some of you may remember the ROM-Drive card I designed, built
and sold (and still sell).  It seems that while many people are
interested in it, they have trouble finding time to put together
a disk image to have me then burn onto an EPROM.  Although the
current drive is very fast and reliable, sometimes it would be
cool to be able to just write directly to it like a hard drive.
There is a chip out there that acts like RAM and automatically
burns itself to EEPROM on powerdown but it holds very little
memory and is prohibitively expensive for this application.
There are other options.  Flash-RAM is relatively cheap but it
must be burned in sectors (64KB at a time on the 29F040) and
therefore can't be used directly with ProDOS without some sort
of RAM buffer on the card.  Today I came up with the idea of
having a RAM drive and an equally sized Flash-RAM on board.  On
initial boot-up, the Flash-RAM is copied to RAM.  All operations
occur on the RAM drive.  When you're ready to make things
permanent, you could run a little utility to burn it to the
Flash-ROM.  Currently I'm selling the 1MB ROM-Drives for $60
U.S. but this hi-brid drive would have to be somewhere around
$80 ~ $100 U.S. and be only 512KB.  It could be expanded to
larger capacities for about $30 ~ $35 U.S. per 512KB.  If there
is sufficient interest, I will begin designing and prototyping
this new board.  The last card took almost a year to go from
idea to reality.  This one should only take about 6 months to go
to production.

So now I ask you, would anyone be interested in such a drive at
that cost?




--
Terence J. Boldt
apple2@cgocable.net
http://www.cgocable.net/~apple2
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