DRIEHUIS@HLERUL55.BITNET (12/07/86)
I haven't used the intram-disk myself for two reasons. The first is that
I didn't quite like it, it looked more like an arcade game than it looked
like a RAM disk.
The second was the most important, though. It is documented (but I can't
remember where - sorry) that a desk accessory may under no circumstance
allocate memory dynamically. I can only guess at it, but I fear the Intram
doesn't do anything to correct potential problems with other programs,
that allocate memory and then in some way temporarily giving control to an
accessory.
On a related note, the reset survivable RAM disk works simply by setting
a memory management register to fool the ST into thinking it only has 512K
on board. Thus it cannot conflict with any other program that wishes to use
the same memory, because the memory simply doesn't exist !
And while I'm at it, at first the reset survivable RAM disk failed to work
for me I had put it on my normal startup disk, replacing the RAM disk
I used until then. The problem was a program I wrote to remove remnants of
RAMdisks from a former session after a reboot. This was necessary with
normal RAMdisks, to avoid them being assigned successive higher drive
letters each time you do a warm boot. It simply set ndrives to 1 and
drvbits to 00000011. After removing the remover, the reset survivable RAM
disk has saved me lots of frustration in the edit-compile-link-test-reboot
sequence !
- Bert Driehuis