On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 10:22:14AM +1000, Ian wrote: > ...So I had a couple of grease-monkeys > come and visit me, and they told me that they thought they could make > a generic paging device that would fit into the 32pin space that would give > me Megabytes of space, with my own little address pager (multiplexer) ...
Heh. This is a pretty accurate description of what my board does. It was designed over 3 years ago. The main reason for the paging in our case was that we were using a rotten chipset (430TX) that could not handle addressing for more than 1MB of flash. So we made a little PLD that does paging for us. We've used a 4MB flash device in this way ever since, using 1MB pages. > They went on to say that they could probably make it generic .. some > sort of adapter that would plug into something like compact flash, so that > I could use it in whatever fashion I wanted. Much easier just to page the raw flash device than to try to wrap a big ugly spec like compact flash... > The dream ends here, because the timing was bad .. we didn't have the > $$ to go playing around in the BIOS space ... so it was never invented. > > I believe its still an option, because there are people on this list who are > creating embeded applications that could be in a position to have such > componentry made, and make auxilliary $$ by selling DoC-like components > to other embeders ... Probably not a lot of money selling little $10 adapters to the rather small pool of embedded developers who aren't: (a) smart enough to choose real embedded chipsets with big-flash support built in, or (b) smart enough to realize how easy paging is and design it in themselves.
