> > I'm afraid I side with Aley. I wouldn't say it's impossible, or even that > hard, if you know what you're doing, but there are loads of drawbacks. > > People who want to use the SAM in its own box don't need Ethernet etc etc. > They want a cheap copy of the SAM, no Rage, no 600MHz (what would the point > be with all that power?). I haven't got £400 to spend on another SAM, even > though my real one must eventually pack in (see later). I have no need for > a DVD on my SAM, though I'm sure B-Dos could support it. People have been > trying to put SAM in a PC box for years, and it's complicated. > > So Aley, this is just as naive, but what was that about using the 32K Rom > for OS, C compiler etc? Is it implausible if you used an EPROM? > > -howard >
Sorry, I didn't talk about C in ROM. I wanted 16KB ROM instead of 32KB, since ROM is expensive. And I wrote that Basic could be placed in RAM, and on the other hand DOS could be placed into ROM. When I go into detail, I think that ROM could contain some lowlevel routines, good for anything. Maybe ROM could be even smaller, but I don't know whether there are some hardware limitations or not. (Can be memory page < 16KB on Sam.) If we could have e.g.4KB ROM, and this would save the money, I bet for it. So let's call it BIOS: printer routines, disk drive read/write sectors routines, maybe some very simple menu (as the one on Atari) with POST (power on self test). THe rest we can place into RAM. If we add some DOS functions into ROM, we can save some memory, since DOS is used all time. Basic shouldn't be used when it is not necessary, especially when we have it in RAM. So there could be some kind of "command line", which could load and start programs without basic (Do you know batch files of MS-DOS? Very simple, and still usable.) So that's how I though about it. Aley
