11 Nov
2008
11 Nov
'08
10:45 a.m.
der Mouse wrote:
Personally, I prefer jumpers to soft config for two reasons.
One is that soft config is approximately never documented; it's always
"just run the supplied program" (never mind that I don't have the
for-pay OS that's the only one it runs under and in some cases don't
even have the CPU architecture it's for in the machine).
I'm not a fan of jumperless cards in PCs, for the reasons you note.
But, on the PC, you rarely need to modify those settings once
configured. In the situations I am considering, that's just not an
option. And, the number of jumpers I would need to include would be
daunting in some scenarios (a large RAM cart with UART and Terminal
Emulator ROM)
This one can be addressed by having a real hardware
switch of some sort
(such as a jumper) that acts as a write enable. People for whom the
convenience outweighs the security can leave it set writes-enabled
permanently; people like me who go the other way can use it to
write-protect except when deliberately trying to reconfig.
This is a good idea, and I think I can support this.