VisorCentral.com (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/index.php)
- Springboard Modules (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/forumdisplay.php?forumid=10)
-- Iomega Clik! (http://discussion.visorcentral.com/vcforum/showthread.php?threadid=5097)

Iomega makes the 40 MB clik! drive as a PCMCIA card. You just slide the disk into the card and BAM! 40 Megs of storage. Couldn't be that hard to make that into a springboard module, right?

Think CF form factor:
CF cards should draw less, and the form factor fits better in the Springboard space than PCMCIA form factor. For the utlimate, CF factor supports the IBM Microdrive (340mb).

Don't count on it.....

Problem is, the Palm OS is limited to seeing only 12 megs at a time. So even that developer 8 meg springboard doesn't just function as extra memory, it's weird.

Even if they put out an OS update that would change that, it would have to be major - and therefore us Visor people would be left in the dust in that dept. I doubt a small software patch would fix that problem. Maybe if you can follow what the hackers can tell you to do with replacing the rom chip with a flash rom chip.... and sacrifice your springboard potential b/c of it (using a Palm OS update direct would do that), negating all usefulness.

Bottom line: Unless you want to write your own OS, or can find a hacker who wrote one specifically for this and can give you the exact technical instructions on how to switch out the rom chips (no easy task, and kiss your warranty goodbye), then it looks like we're hosed here.

Doesn't bother me though, I don't really need that much memory. Most Palm OS stuff is small anyway, and all the springboards that have these huge memory supplies (for instance, the 64 meg Rio mp3 player) don't actually expose the OS to the memory size. Something like that clik! drive would have to. So there's a way around it for dedicated machines that access the memory independent of the processor, but there's pretty much no hope for this to happen just from the basic architecture of the Visor.

I think that this assumes that the drive (whatever type it would be) is treated as "memory".

A drive, however is storage. Chunks of data flow into memory for use. The OS would not have to "address" the drive, just the RAM.

The software on any such springboard would just have to have an access routine that managed moving chunks of data to/from the RAM in chunks that the OS could handle.

No?

[This message has been edited by LambdaFox (edited 10-08-1999).]

i'm curious, the palm emulator can only be put up to 8meg of ram, the highest palm/visor out there has 8megs, and if you get an upgrade card/add-on card, you can only go up to 8 megs. Therefor I (and others i am sure) have come to think that the OS can only handle 8 megs. Unless one of the updates on OS 3.1 for the Visor was to allow for higer memory, how does the Visor address the memory in the 8 meg springboard and the 6-Pack springboard. Is Flash tatally adressed diferently (i know that 800 someodd k of flash on the palms is only usable through TRG flash proggs so would the springboard flash be the same?)

Well now that I know that Springboards can override the Palm OS, that just changes *EVERYTHING*. OK, what if, to skip the issue entirely, they just include a small patch inside the thing that lets the Palm OS see more than 12 megs directly? Then when you remove the cartridge, -poof-, no more patch, back to normal operation.
Yeah, once they made that announcement, that pretty much made anything possible.

FWIW,

I believe that the memory limitation is related to the DragonballEZ CPU that palm devices use. The OS is not the limitation as far as I know.

sluggo

ok, someone please tell me, what is the most mem avail on a Palm device (or how much mem do you get total when you install a xtra xtra board in a IIIx)

Also, what does "IMHO" mean

in my humble opinion

When you install the extra/extra memory card in your IIIx, you get 8MB of memory. The memory card disables the 4MB onboard the palm in favor of the larger memory source (the memory board is an 8MB board).

The DragonballEZ suposedly can only address one source of memory of up to 16MB of RAM.

IMHO, the reason we have not seen a 16MB board for Palm devices is the cost. Yes, I know that PC memory is (somewhat) reasonable, but the cost of manufacturing a special memory board with the specific type of memory that Palms use, is costly.

Hope this is helpful.

sluggo

ok, if the chip/os goes after the board w/ the most mem, what happens to the 4 megs on the regular board? does it just sit there idlely and uselessly? Does the flash still work on from the origional board?

[This message has been edited by Chronoso (edited 10-12-1999).]

the 4 megs from the IIIx is overridden by the 8 meg upgrade. nothing really happens to it, it just sits there dormant, waiting for you to remove the 8 meg board so it will be active again.

the flash ram that is in the IIIx is not affected by the change. it will still flash upgrade the os and store items in flash memory using trg's flashpro.

hope this helps.

sluggo

so what is the final decision here...would the dragonballEZ processor refuse to acknowledge the 40 mb of memory on a click disk? will there never be any way of having more than 16 megs of available memory? i don't understand this after looking at innogear's minijam mp3 player/voice recorder. it supposedly has 32+ megs. it seems if one springboard could do this, another could, no?
and btw, does anyone know of the minijam will be available before christmas?

Most of this has been discussed elsewhere, but...

DragonBallEZ is a 32 bit architecture. It can address 2^32 bits of memory space, or 512MB. However, the DRAM controller built into the Palms can address only 8MB. The way you get around this limitation is through paging.

<technical>
You can access 8MB of memory at a time as an offset from a 32 bit base pointer. This means there is a page switch when you want to access data outside of the 8MB window, since your offset is limited. This incurs a small performance hit, since you need to add some extra code to do this. However, you have to be careful not to cause lots of page swapping; ie sorting across 8MB boundaries using naive algorithms. If you do, your overhead becomes higher than your useful work, and you are basically thrashing.
</technical>

What this means is the storage options are essentially unlimited. Otherwise the 8MB addon wouldn't really do any good! It does imply, though, that work done with extrememly large databases and files (>8MB) will need to have code written with the page swapping limitation in mind. Otherwise this code will perform poorly.

As far as springboards like the Innogear mp3 player, the memory on the springboard does NOT need to be visible to the Visor. In all likelyhood there are two completely seperate memories, processors, and buses. The DragonBallEZ does NOT have the floating point power to decode realtime high bitrate mp3 files. The innogear is essentially just getting control data from the Visor and outputting the song info, control states, etc. This just requires a small memory-mapped I/O window, or something similar, to allow data to be exchanged.

Besides, page swapping is not a new concept. For instance, Apple 2e computers with the 6502 processor could access 64k. But there were memory boards at the time that could squeeze about 17 megs of memory to be available. Never mind that the floppy drives held about 140k.

If somebody came out with a CF converter for the springboard, the drivers could be downloaded to the springboard so it knew how to handle them. Granted that the entire idea of the springboard is to now have to fool with drivers, but it makes things easier that way. Besides, it would shut Microsoft's argument up about the Visors being so proprietary.

Theoretically you should be able to hang a hard drive off of a springboard. It takes away the portability, but then you could have a 20 gig PDA. Try to fill that up...

I think it could happen because like a normal hard drive the Clik could be "Partioned" This is only MHO

-Justin (The Great One, You Can Just Call Me GO)

The 8MB flash card is treated like a 2nd hard drive, right? It won't automatically save right onto the card, you need to transfer programs and files onto the flash, from what I've heard. So, if someone built a CF adapter, then they could put in some kind of memory block remover so that it could allow any amount, right?

------------------
Signing off,

C. Russell
[email protected]