crunch@well.UUCP (John Draper) (10/17/86)
< food for thought > MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ASDG "CARD-RACK" -------------------------------------------- Finally recieved my ASDG "card-rack" from UPS. After littering the floor with all those styrofoam packing chips, I get this "black-box". About 6 x 10 x 10. With it, I also got their 2 meg board. It's using the 256k chips, and there are a LOT of them. Then I noticed that it had NO fan. I learned out later that it wasn't necessary. The ram chips are remarkably cool. The card-rack also has it's own power supply. It looks sturdy, and well built. Using a standard power supply transformer and regulator circuitry. It looks "overkill" but, I would rather have "overkill" than a weak and over-heated power supply. The card-rack plugs into the side of the Amiga into the edge connector. There is NO "through" connector on the other side. However, on the inside of the card-rack is a "motherboard" with 2 edge connectors. Into that, you can plug in an array of other cards. I hope that ASDG will be making other larger card-racks with more edge connectors for those people wanting more peripherals on their Amiga, but 2 is all I need. I am a software developer looking for faster ways of Editing, Compiling Linking, and Loading. Developing on floppies is not only demorilizing and humiliating, it's disgusting. Software developers use LOTS and LOTS of memory and disk space. And, unfortunately, developers will crash the system a lot and visit the local "guru". Not only do we need LOTS and LOTS of memory (greed greed!!), but we need lots of FAST disk space. Compiling and Linking require LOTS of random seeks to certain spots on a disk, Floppies don't do seeks fast, but RAMDISK really FLIES!! After taking 5 minutes (perhaps longer) to load up ramdisk and re-assigning the "world" to the ramdisk, you step from the sluggish floppy world into pure heaven. EVERYTHING you do happens so FAST, that you say (huh!! wha happened!!, is it done??, already??). Remember!! when using the workbench or cli, it takes time to load programs from floppy. When running everything from ramdisk, it's almost "instantaneous". When I do "avail" I get: Available Memory Type Total Largest chip 438000 437808 fast 941240 833336 all 1379240 833336 That means I have 833k of ramdisk that's FREE, I'm using about 900k of ramdisk that includes ALL my commands, ALL my includes, ALL my librarys, ALL my drivers, and ALL my source, my .o files, my batch files. The ONLY thing I have on floppies is all my .o and .c files. I have a batch file that saves the source before compiling, then copies the .o file to floppy. Not only do I have all that FAST DISK space, but I have all that OTHER ram that can be used by my application. I also have rigged up a "try" command, that allows me to quickly add a few "kprintf's" which display debugging information, then recompile (without saving the .o and .c to floppy), then automatically go into the application. All this takes LESS than 20 seconds, which would have taken about 80 seconds. This is really useful if you want to just try something without making it permenent. -------------- After recieving the recoverable ramdisk ----------- Now, I'm really cookin. I just got the ASDG Recoverable Ramdisk software release 2.0. Installation was pretty streight forward. I had to copy the "mountlist" file and the "vdisk.device" file in the "devs" directory. Then I edited the startup-sequence file in the "s" directory to: mount vd0: stack 10240 set CLIB=vd0:lib INCLUDE=vd0:include cp df0: to vd0: all assign c: vd0:c assign s: vd0:s assign devs: vd0:devs assign sys: vd0: assign l: vd0:l assign fonts: vd0:fonts assign libs: vd0:libs I only do this ONCE when I start my development session. I never have to re-load ramdisk from now on. However!! Thats not to say that you cannot trash it. For some reason while working on a program that did a directory, It created a directory, but for some reason, when I wanted to delete that directory, I couldn't do it. It had somehow gotten locked. I think my program screwed up and didn't release a "lock" on a directory. Because if that, I couldn't delete it. Now, my program can call on the GURU as much as it likes, and I can get back up again in the same time it takes to boot cli and do another mount. This second disk I call the "recover" disk. The "recover" disk "startup-sequence" is exacly like above, except that it doesn't have the "cp df0: to vd0: all" line. Oh!! BTW, I use UNIX a lot, and so I renamed my commands to UNIX names. You would have to use "copy" in the above line. My programming "throughput" has increased by about 2.5 times. I no longer have to use a third disk (Because my cli disk was full) to hold all my software tools like "grep", and all the other Manx commands. I have EVERYTHING in ramdisk. And everytime I compile, I do the following: cp <name>.c df1:dirname cc +idump -L100 <name> cp <name>.o df1:dirname It only takes less than 10 seconds. Copying the source to disk doesn't increase the time by more than 3 seconds, because BEFORE the disk activity is finished, the Assembler is already munching on the output from the compiler. After compiling, the linking takes about the same time. I link 12 modules (the gadget editor) in about 15 seconds or so. Debugging programs is also a dream. I have collected a large ligrary of structure display routines which I can now keep in ramdisk and link in as needed. I have another file called "try" which does the following: cc +idump -L100 <file> Then I have a batch file called "run" which links up the modules and executes the program but doesn't copy it to disk. I use this when I need to insert "printf" statements into code to examine various variables or results. This compiles and links even faster. So, as far as Amiga software development goes, I'm in "FAT CITY". I even have my Amiga Documentation and InfoMinder instantly available whenever I forget what the structures do, or need to look at the 100k intuition.doc file. So, I think I chose wizely when I decided to get a ram-expansion unit first. If you are just about ready to spend $1500 for a hard disk, you might want to invest in one of these expansion units first. This can give you time to decide which hard disk to buy. I also hear that a SCSI card will soon be available. If you want more information on where to get one of these amazing ASDG boards, I suppose you can contact "Perry" at the following Net address, or call him at (201)-540-5670.
eric@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Eric Lavitsky) (10/17/86)
<munch a buncha> From: <well!crunch> (John Draper) > If you want more information on where to get one of these amazing >ASDG boards, I suppose you can contact "Perry" at the following Net >address, or call him at (201)-540-5670 Actually ASDGs' phone number is 201-540-9670, and their address is: 280 River Rd., Suite 54A Piscataway, NJ 08854 Eric -- ARPA: LAVITSKY@RUTGERS or LAVITSKY@RED.RUTGERS.EDU UUCP: ...{ihnp4,pyrnj}!topaz!eric ...hplabs!well!lavitsky ...{decvax,seismo,allegra}!ulysses!eric