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parb33
Member

Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Lawrence, NY, USA
Posts: 148

quote:
Originally posted by EricG
All things considered and difficulties aside, I think the ideal thing would be to have a CF adaptor with flash ram (i.e. 8 MB), the CFAutoloader could copy the data from the CF card to the flash ram instead of the visor's main ram.. this would better simulate the way people would expect the automover to work and solve some of the complaints. In essence the cards flash ram would be scratch area for the automover to shuffle things in/from the CF card to visor ram (if need be). Obviously, some things won't work properly in flash ram, but that's another hurdle. (just my 2 cents)

Why not regular RAM?

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Life's just a blast, just it's moving really fast, and you'd <BR>better stay on top or life'll kick you in the ass -Limp Bizkit

02-04-2001 09:27 PM

JHromadka
VisorCentral Staff

Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Texan in Calgary for a while
Posts: 1361

quote:
Originally posted by parb33
Why not regular RAM?

Because then the 2MB Visor owners wouldn't have to worry about having any free space available on their Visor. You basically would get an 8MB Flash module but with unlimited storage space.

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James Hromadka
Old Friend

02-05-2001 01:24 AM

parb33
Member

Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Lawrence, NY, USA
Posts: 148

quote:
Originally posted by parb33
Why not regular RAM?

In other words, why shouldn't the compact flash adapter include an extra 8 megabyes of regular RAM, rather than flash RAM (as was proposed by EricG)? What is gained by the using of flash RAM?

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Life's just a blast, just it's moving really fast, and you'd <BR>better stay on top or life'll kick you in the ass -Limp Bizkit

02-05-2001 02:02 AM

miradu
TreoCentral Staff

Registered: May 2000
Location: St. Paul, MN
Posts: 1429

RAM is Volitle Random Access memory. Volitle means that the data is lost if the power is gone. The Visor uses this kind of RAM as it's main memory. That's why if oyu take the batteries out too long, it's like doing a hard reset.

Flash RAM is a term for EEPROM. EEPROM is memory that is Non-Volitle, meaning that it will keep storing data without any electricity. Non-Volitle memory are mainly magnetic (floppy's hard drives) or optical (CD's, DVD's). It can also be many different things. EEPROM works by re-writing t higher voltages than reading, there fore the poition of the electrons? can be changed.

Flash RAM is in high demand now and is expensive. RAM is always pretty cheap, actually it's really cheap, your comptuer memory is RAM, check out the prices on http://www.nanosys1.com ! )

The visor uses 2 mb of ROM to store the Palm OS instead of Flash RAM (EEPROM). All springboard modules that have RAM in them, use flash RAM. It would be expensive to put Flash RAM in there, but than you could use that 8 mb to store data. RAM would be ok, but the data would only be kept ad long as the module is in the visor.

Hopefully this answers some questions.. I' mnot an expert, but I did do a paper on how storage is changing the world

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02-05-2001 02:15 AM

EricG
Member

Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Alive and well on VisorCentral.com
Posts: 861

Each has it's merits and negative aspects. I honestly didn't think a great deal about using regular ram, in theory it would work and might actually be faster in general operation and possibly use less power and allow for direct writes to any databases (I'm not an EE so I wouldn't know for sure about power drain), but as stated above, when the power was gone (i.e. removed from the springboard slot) so would any data/apps stored on it. By using FLASH, you could keep your more frequently accessed programs and databases, etc. at the ready without worry.. (these "frequently used" apps could be placed or CACHED in the modules "ram" either manually via a file mover type app or automatically by the Autofilemover)

Like I said, I am not an electrical engineer so I don't have the skills to make such a beast (I'm just an EE wanna be, got bit by the computer bug instead ), hopefully someone who is reading this does and I have inspired them.. Having a module like this in the Visor community is reward enough.

02-05-2001 04:22 AM

mridge
Member

Registered: Sep 2000
Location: Raleigh, NC
Posts: 18

Palm OS Source code

kessler,

If you join the Palm Alliance program at palmos.com, you can get some source code. Here is a snip from the web page:

quote:
The Palm OS� Source Code that is available in this program is a subset of various versions of Palm OS operating system source code. It contains most of the interesting parts of the User Interface and System source code. This includes user interface widgets, memory manager, database manager, and the system event handler. It does not include all of the ROM Source Code; for instance, it does not include the communications subsystem, TCP stack, or IR stack.

Since you stated that TRG has all of the source code, I assume you are implying that you don't have any. Forgive me if you already know about this program.

quote:
This is extremely difficult software to write since it requires very detailed knowledge of how the system calls in the Palm operating system work. TRG has all the source code for the Palm operating system which makes it a lot easier for them ... and they still didn't have the AutoCF capability until long after they released their hardware.

I am very excited about the CF Adapter, so I wanted to make sure you knew the code is available.

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Matt Ridge
Upward Technologies
www.upwardtechnologies.com

02-05-2001 10:59 PM

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