[net.micro.amiga] ASDG Heaven

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
-- 
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