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Re: DiskMaker 8 Version 1.1 Released



Martin Doherty wrote:
Apprentice wrote:
[snip]
This would work however your RAM disk is from your aux slot based
RamWorks card and this won't work.  DiskMaker 8 uses aux memory for
it's own purposes and therefore will disconnect your RamWorks card.
DiskMaker 8 only needs that first 64K of the card.  Is there a way that
I can make the remainder of the card available?
Probably ... I have special drivers to use RamWorks as a ramdisk from Apple Pascal 1.2, the Pascal system itself uses the first 128K and the rest is temp storage space. I can load up all the Pascal system files onto the card and make it my boot volume for extra whizzy performance (kind of eery to use Apple Pascal with nary a grinding disk drive to be heard).

I can even restart the machine to run a game, BASIC etc ... then restart Pascal from disk and run a program that reconnects the ramdisk, with its previous contents intact.

I don't know if this is do-able under ProDOS the same way though, since ProDOS makes its own assumptions about how a RAM disk should be configured.

IIRC, the various OEM supplied drivers which avoided this problem. For example, the ZRam for my 2c uses such a driver. It is even possible to select a certain amount of ram for use on programs such as Appleworks and the rest available as ramdisk. The only real problem I've seen with aux slot based ramdisks is software which attempts to read from disk directly to the aux bank ram. An example of this problem would be the Apex development system 128k version when booted from the ramdisk.

Cheers,
Mike T.