12 Nov
2008
12 Nov
'08
7:15 a.m.
Jim Brain wrote:
I'm considering designing some cartridges for the
CBM line of computers,
but I'd prefer to skip masses of jumper blocks and move to a soft-config
option.
I agree that retaining config in memory seems a better approach than jumpers
in this particular case (much as I like jumpers) - so long as the loss of that
state memory doesn't actually introduce any major inconveniences for the user.
Can you extract some sort of meaningful version / ID information from the data
held within the cartridge? If so, maybe keep the cartridges simple (just a bit
of ROM), but have a box of tricks which plugs between the cartridges and the
cartridge port on the machine itself and is responsible for retaining
config/state information. (Of course this only works if you know that a user
won't want to own two cartridges for application 'foobar' and hold different
config info for each...)
cheers
Jules