Portable Plus - Additional RAM

[Michael Fehlhammer]

Thank you, Martin,
I've read that thread meanwhile; its a fascinating projekt, I plan to assemble such a device myself.
But for the PP interface speed is really a matter: The transfer speed via PIL Box ( and this is also the IL-interface within the Arduino project ) is approx. 1 kB / sec. Imagine you place a development environment like Turbo C on virtual disk ( it doesn't fit onto the 1MB RAM drawer ); now you start a binary, let's say a linker or compiler from there, it might be 60 kB in length ( which isn't a huge file, of course ) - you would have to wait one minute just for the file to be loaded! Development cycle times would become ridiculous. Access to internal RAM or electronic disk (RAM drawer) is orders of magnitude faster, of course.
But nevertheless the SD-card project is great; especially when accessing a LIF disk using a HP 71b or 41C, speed is not a problem; the files are much smaller, and the calculators' IL interface is the bottleneck anyway.