From: William Pociengel (hseldon_at_my.wgu.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 20 2005 - 19:50:01 PDT
John Hay wrote:
> Thursday, October 20, 2005 at 8:31:31 AM Eastern Standard Time
>
> If I don't hear from someone(s) then this project will never leave the
> ground. I don't have the technical expertise to coordinate that side of
> the plan.
> Yes, this is a repost of my prior cry for a volunteer this past Tuesday,
> see the post on List, here's a snip:
>
> Regarding the possibility of putting together a one-time production run
> of 12 MB internal memory chips .......
The biggest part of the HW side is finding enough drivable lines to
address additional memory (without getting into yucky page swapping).
I've never hacked my newt so i couldn't tell you what resources are
available for use; and i no longer have access to logic analyzers to
poke around with. so this part would need to come from someone who has
already done the poking. spec'ing out chips, laying out pcb's, finding a
fab, QA, etc are the 'easy' part.
From the SW side you need a mechanism to flip the bitty address lines
(wherever you happen to find them). oh and that all has to be
transparent to the OS so you need hooks into the OS to allow this to
happen. I doubt the newt has all of these extra address lines just
sitting there tied to ground waiting to be exploited. so you need
someone who is very familiar with the OS at a pretty deep level.
the other issue is as the amount of memory grows then so does the
overhead in managing the memory, which is more than just addressing it
but allocating, releasing (garbage collection) and such. then if you
want to get fancy you could toss in some routines for compaction, which
i 'think' are already in there.
oh and one more item, for something like this you need either patience
to allow it to happen or you need to hire the expertise. you'll likely
not get this done by making a request and then wondering if you haven't
heard back in 3 days; unless you wave VERY large sums of _$$$$$_ cash.
in which case when would you like delivery, this afternoon or would
tomorrow morning be to late ;-)
-- special knowledge can be a terrible disadvantage if it leads you too far along a path that you cannot explain anymore. mentat admonition -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Oct 20 2005 - 21:30:16 PDT