PZ wrote:
The CF devices on the Apple II are pretty seamless. The're essentially IDE hard drive controllers, and GSOS drivers are available for all of them. Unfortunately only some, but not all, have partition schemes as good as the ones older SCSI controllers provided. The most limited one maxes out at 8 ProDOS partitions (or 4 ProDOS + 2 HFS), which is still ok. Anyhow, its good to have a variety of options available.
Rich has explained that only "hardwired" partitioning schemes are implemented on the CFFA because the card would have to have a RAM buffer to hold a partition table read from disk. SCSI and IDE controller cards for the Apple do have RAM on board, but the CFFA does not. In principle, the RAM could be allocated from Apple memory, but there are no "reserved" areas that would be safe for doing so (and you don't want your partition table to get changed!). -michael
ben yates wrote:On Sun, 15 Oct 2006 08:51:52 -0700, Simon D. Williams wrote:I was just reading about flash memory replacing hard drives in some new laptops, and it occurred to me that in this regard the Apple II is well ahead of current technology. Hats off to Rich Dreher and the CFFA!It's not just the Apple II... I have a compact flash for my TI-99 as well. Seems we have a lot of "experimenters" bringing new technology to old machines. Besides, a compact flash on a TI is _much_ faster than a floppy, and more compatible than a SCSI drive with existing software, albeit not hardware. How does that work on the Apple II?
-- -michael NadaNet networking for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."