Re: How do I add firmware to a card?

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

David Empson schrieb:
> <heuser.marcus@freenet.de> wrote:
> >
> > How much RAM does the drive have?
>
> There was another post in the thread mentioning it has 2 KB in total.
>
> That includes all space used for disk I/O buffers, zero page and stack
> space, leaving you with approximately 1 KB of usable RAM, though you
> might be able to stretch it to about 1.75 KB if you were able to reuse
> the disk I/O buffer space.

Thanks for the info - the "computer" in the drive seems somewhat
similar to the one in a Commodore 1541 drive. It also has a 6502,
2K RAM and is programmable - but slower: only 1 MHz and is very
slowly interfaced to a C64/C128/whatever.

However, the games company Magnetic Scrolls reportedly used
the capabilities of the drive to parse (or accelerate the parsing of)
the input of the graphical adventure "The Pawn" in the C64-version.

Of course the vocabulary resides in the host computer due to its
size but the grammatical checking could be done in the drive.

I don't know to which extent this is true but this could be an
interesting purpose - at least in the "Commie-world" where
nearly every C64-user had this drive: It's needed to play the game ;-)

As you said there were not that many Apple drives in existence at
the time to be of commercial interest.

bye
Marcus