What's a half meg on the Atari800 good for under

[Jeffrey S. Worley]

Good question.  There are upgrades up to 4mb, but ones for the 800 most
common range from 64k to 1088k.  A pair of really common and several
less common standards have  existed for many years.  This one conforms
to the Axlon standard, which is among the oldest for the Atari's.  It
switches the banks in 32k increments.  The other standard was set by
Atari on the introduction of the 130xe; that switches in 16k
increments.
Aside from a ramdisk, what can you do with it?
My primary reason for building the thing is to gain memory for the
Spartados X operating system, which benefits greatly from more memory
(256k is the sweet spot).  SDX barely runs on 48k ram and the SIDE
driver does not load.  SIDE2 is a cartridge for the machine that grafts
a CF slot on and allows it to act as a hard disk under SDX.  This is of
course very useful.
Here's a link to the Spartados X cooperative: 
http://sdx.atari8.info/index.php
The Side2 cart, in addition to hosting Spartados X and the CF hard disk
controller and firmware, also hosts a real-time clock, and can carry
several other  programs which must be hosted by hardware because of
thier bank-selecting rom design, such as Basic XL, Basic
XE...  Spartados is a 256k bank-selected cartridge itself.
Released in 1988 by ICD, Spartados X is a surprisingly rich disk
operating system which adds a host of features not available on other
8-bit machines.  IO redirection and batch processing, memory
management, paths of various sorts...
Here's a link to the Side2 cart, which comes with the SDX firmware pre-
loaded:

https://lotharek.pl/productdetail.php?id=55
Being able to load the SIDE driver and access the CF slot as a hard
disk is my primary purpose.  The machine will have ample memory to run
real programs while running SDX, which is also very important.
Best,
Jeff
On Fri, 2019-08-02 at 13:06 -0500, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 12:39 PM Jeffrey S. Worley via cctalk <
> cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> > I'm building as many as ten of a 512k Axlon compatible memory board
> > for
> > 
> > the Atari 800 (not xl) computer.  If you'd like to have one, please
> > 
> > message me and let me know so I can reserve one for you.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > I'm not sure of my cost at the moment, but it is something on the
> > order
> > 
> > of $30.00 per board.  I'll tot things up when I get around to it,
> > but
> > 
> > it will probably come out to less.  So for parts and shipping, you
> > can
> > 
> > have one.  Here's a photo of the completed board:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > https://atariage.com/forums/topic/256464-designing-an-axlon-compatible-board/page/2/#comments
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > https://atariage.com/forums/topic/256464-designing-an-axlon-compatible-board/page/2/#comments
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > I've got all the parts on order but the boards, for which I'm
> > waiting
> > 
> > for a quote.  I gather the boards are about $10.00 each but am not
> > 
> > counting my chickens quite yet.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Best,
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Technoid Mutant
> 
> Hi, Technoid!
> 
> I'm certainly interested. I didn't know 512KB was possible in the
> original 800. Other than RAM disks, do you know what sorts of things
> it would let me do?
> 
>