apang@undergrad.cs.ubc.ca (Anthon 'Amiga' Pang) (02/07/90)
portuesi@sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) writes in an article: >ggibeau@ucqais.uc.edu (AMOEBOID) said: > >> If the reason CBM is orphaning the A-1000 with the latest >> trade-in deal is because 1.4 will require 512K ROM space, there >> are alternatives. Get rid of the daughterboard and insert >> ROM inside, or replace daughterboard altogether. You mean 2000's and 500's have provisions (eg rom sockets) for more ROM ? Maybe it's time I did trade in my A1000...funny thing is, I'm sort of in the market to get another 1000 :) >I seem to remember hearing (from someone at Commodore no less) that >the A1000 could support 512K ROMS, but that there were no sockets on >the motherboard for the other 256K. That doesn't sound like an >insurmountable problem. Sure there's address space reserved for it... "Insurmountable" ? Wouldn't some problems include: (1) Hacking the motherboard to put sockets for the ROMs there. Messing with the motherboard is already a step in the wrong direction. The WCS happens to be on the daughterboard. (2) Modifying the daughterboard would probably be extensive--how would we go about adding RAM, resolving the WCS "trick" to write protect the WOM, and the fact that the lower 256K (of "ROM" space) is an image of the upper 256K. (3) And there's swapping the WCS ROM that reads the KICKSTART disk...if (2) gets solved. Replacing the daughterboard is the only feasible solution to adding 256K. There could be a KWICSTART III :) (Is Michigan Software interested ?) How about a REJUVENATOR II ? (Hello, Greg...) But I doubt we A1000 users will ever see a WCS II (At least, I hope it's not a high priority R&D project...we do want the 3000 to see the light of day.) >Wouldn't it also be possible to make 256K of those ROMS into >disk-loadable libraries on the A1000? I have a hard disk, I don't >care where the machine gets its libraries from. Isn't that what we have now in LIBS:, DEVS:, L: ? A1000 owners will just see more of these made nonresident to make way for more important goodies (eg L:FastFileSystem & FFS floppies) in that core 256K. The only major problem is if they don't have any room for exec.library or dos.library ! :) :)