Re: Possible new hardware project

[Roger Roden <acer00@earthlink.net>]

I would be interested.

"Terence J. Boldt" wrote:
> 
> 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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