From: Goodwin, Greg P. (GoodwinG_at_aafes.com)
Date: Thu Aug 04 2005 - 07:14:50 PDT
Greg thanks...I think!=20
I get the HHGTTG reference (in fact I blame Douglas Adams for my wanting
a Newton and having unrealistic expectations in the first place!)
However could you elaborate on the 'Dont'?
-=3D-=3D-=3D-
Now that I've got your attention, allow me to elaborate. :)
The ATA drivers work well, I would give it about 85% reliable with
about about 60% the speed of linear flash.
So there we go. =20
My experience, I bought a 1 gig card. That was a great purchase and
came in handy many times, and some of that was even as a Newton drive.
:D =20
Got things set up. I formatted that puppy for 1 gig partition. Oh
that was beautiful!!! And then I ran into the Newton connection utility
that didn't recognize the drive. It was so big. So I partitioned the
Newton to four 256 mb partitions.
That went better. Because of the transfer speed to the Newton
and how it digests files even over Ethernet and appletalk, you are
looking at a 4 mg MP3 file taking like ten minutes to transfer to a
linear flash card. Longer to a ATA card. So you are best off
transferring to a linear flash card and transferring to a ATA card.
So after days and days of putting stuff on this card, and MP3's,
and whole libraries, I learned real quick to work with the various
partitions and spread out the files. However, on average about maybe 50
mb of 256 mb of space would be used before it would take the Newton a
good 15-20 seconds to bring up the directory of files. And God help you
if you bring up ALL the directories at once.
I was sooo sooo pleased to have so many games, files, MP3's,
mods.... oh yeh, mods. Weird thing that. Every time you turn off and
bring the Newton back on, the mods would be frozen. Got old fast having
to unfreeze the mods I wanted before playing that.
But I was sooo pleased. I had a Newton with 1 gb of space that
could play MP3's. Well, it could play it moderately well. At least
Mp3's did not slow down or add to the directory list, so that was great.
But as time went on, madmax (mp3 player) would lock up, as it does, and
the only thing you could do was restart the Newton.
Now this does not bide well with the ATA cards. A few times of
that, and you have a botched drive. All of it. Would be nice if you
could format a partition here or there, but it doesn't seem that
detailed. And no defrag for the Newton ATA cards. =20
So days and days of files transfers are thrown away as you have to
format the drive again. A time or two of that, and I resolved to play
with it more when more improvements have been added.
And so now you see why I say "Don't". ;)
Like many things in the Newton universe, it seems that the ATA
drivers, MadMax, and other developments reach a beta stage where they
prove it can be done, and then the author gets bored and moves on to
something else, leaving something that will work to a point, and
eventually crash your Newton fairly hard.
=20
What do I want lots of ATA storage space for? A Mp3 player. Can
the Newton do it? Yes! ATA storage space and MP3's work well together
on the Newton when few other things don't.
In my mind there are three major hurdles for a Newton to become a
fairly good MP3 player. Ignoring the fact that the Newton does not
have a headphone jack (aside from the Emate) and is mono out, but aside
from that...
=20
1) Mad Max... needs to developed just a bit further. It plays
Mp3s at 64 k bitrate I would say well to even good, but when that puppy
locks up, it locks up hard. Some kind of buffer recovery or failsafe
would be nice to have it error out or stop the process before a crash so
hard you have REMOVE THE BATTERY to make it reset. Yeh.
2) File transfers to the Newton. You know, even the crappiest Mp3
player has a card in it that can be connected to a computer media reader
for quick placing of files. For my Mac to load up 64 mb on a smart
media card, roughly a minute or two. Load up a 1 gig microdrive...
maybe ten minutes. Now you see why I object to one MP3 taking 15
minutes to load on a Newton. That is just... pathetic.
3) You know if the above were better, the ATA drivers would
probably not suffer near as much. It still locks up on it's own on
occation, but the MP3 player has to be a good portion of it. If I could
reload a ATA drive quicker (see #2) it would not be as deflating as
loosing an entire large drive, and it taking DAYS, not minutes, not
hours, but DAYS to reload that card... then I would not be so
disheartened.
Really while I think about it, the ATA may not be 100% perfect,
but is not as much the problem as the other two.
I would like to not carry another device around, and use the
Newton for a MP3 player, but at the very least the MadMax player needs
to be more stable. =20
=20
Anything other than MP3 (and in truth, anything else on the Newton
does not take near as much time) and you are just looking at slower
directory times... I mean so slow you'll think the Newton has crashed
and not coming back. But give it a good minute and it will bring that
directory up for you. :)
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