exspes@gdr.bath.ac.uk (P E Smee) (06/10/91)
After ages of thinking about upgrading the ROMs and expanding the memory of my old 520ST (one of the originals, no modulator or builtin floppy, external power supply) I stumbled across a friend selling a used 1040STF, system unit only, so I bought that instead. This means I've got a 520 going spare. No monitor, and ancient ROMs, so it's probably not worth selling. Works, so I hate to throw it out. Occurred to me that I could hack it about a bit instead. Question is, what to do with it? Ideas which have occurred to me are to turn it into an external RAMdisk, to turn it into a super-intelligent printer buffer, or to make it into an external disk cache for my floppy drives. Or, maybe, some configureable combination of the above. I've got a couple of spare floppy mechs, so it could conceivably be used to support a second pair of drives. All assuming that I work out a sensible way to interconnect the two STs, and write the required drivers for both ends. Anyone else found themself in this situation? Any hints, or ideas that I've missed? Owing to the amount of peripheral stuff I've got plugged in, would be preferable if they spoke to each other through either the DMA or the MIDI ports. -- Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!ukc!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132