Portable Plus - Additional RAM

[Martin Hepperle]

(03-20-2015 01:19 AM)Michael Fehlhammer Wrote:  ...
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 ) ...

Michael,

I placed the command line tools for Turbo-C 1.5 on my Portable Plus (the GUI would not work anyway). It fits on the RAM disk (1MB memory drawer) and allows to compile and link small programs using Makefiles. I used it for some small HP-IL exploration programs.
I can create a ZIP archive or a file list with the tree structure on my system if it helps.
The only problem is that I use the VDE editor and this seems to have a memory resp. file handle leak so that I have to revert back to PAM and then start a new DOS command interpreter after a few edit/compile/link cycles.

I agree, that a larger RAM disk would be preferable. This would require some static RAM chips with a decoding logic and an MS-DOS block device driver which controls the I/O. The device driver part could be derived from MS-DOS RAM disk source code. However, the hardware would require someone with more knowledge than me to design such a system with minimum power consumption. The interface to the hardware is well documented.

Burning Turbo-C with a decent editor into a ROM set would be very useful.

Martin