To merge port memory or not that is the question...

[jonmoore]

After a very, very long wait, I finally took ownership of a replacement 128k card today for slot 1 duties. It's primary use case is to spread an "all you can eat" installation of SpeedUI across ports 0 & 1, whilst leaving a healthy 60+k of port 0 RAM.

However, the process of rejigging my SpeedUI installation, led to a nagging thought that a clean install based on merged port memory may have advantages I've not considered.

Does anyone have any views on this? At the moment I'm erring on the side of "if it aint' broke...", but I'm not afraid of the nuclear option if it brings reasonable benefits.

I keep my 48 fairly lean these days and over the years have trimmed away those things that can can be done faster and more conveniently on my 50g. That means that I mainly use my 48 for numerical tasks but I do still maintain a ALG48 based covered port which also contains those libraries that lean of ALG48 to do their thing - these are mainly linear algebra libraries, and this is where I do use my 48 for symbolic tasks.

I find the ALG48 ecosystem to be fairly performant running from a covered port, but I do wonder if I might be bettor off with less working RAM, and use merged port memory for both SpeedUI and ALG ecosystem duties. I find that most of my 48 crashes are RAM related, hence my RAM is king approach. But I'm ready to be convinced otherwise.

BTW I highly recommend RetroTronik (memory cards). Great product, great price, speedy tracked delivery and really great customer service!