Date   : Fri, 19 Jun 1992 04:58:08 +1200
From   : julian <julian@...>
Subject: Morley RAM disc

Hi all.

A while ago my Dad purchased one of those Morley RAM discs. It has 1Mb of
RAM in it, interfaced via 1MHz bus. It is a wonderful device, providing 256
'subdrives' (virtual drives) and a DFS-like interface to each subdrive.

There are two major obvious differences between the ramdisc filing system
and DFS... each subdrive can have as many files as it likes in the
catalogue, and you don't need to compact the files. There are also a number
of cosmetic differences... the catalogues are not sorted by either filename
or directory letter, but outputs filenames in the order they were first
saved...

However, it is incompatible with ADFS, to the point of the machine not
functioning if ADFS is present. The only way to get it going on such a
machine is to disable ADFS. I was wondering if anyone knows whether Morley
ever produced an update to the software which was more ADFS-friendly, before
they stopped selling the ramdisc?

I wrote a custom drawing program for the beeb-with-ramdisc which could plot
and print out images much larger than one screenfull. In fact you could
create a virtual screen three physical screens wide by however many you
wanted deep. (The horizontal limit is due to the printer not being able to
print any wider). When editing you can scroll around the virtual screen with
the CTRL-cursor keys. The physical screen is a custom 256x256 pixel "square
Mode 4" screen. Is there anyone else out there with a morley ramdisc who
might be interesting in seeing this software?

    Cheers, Julian.
--
wright_j@...                |---------------------| "I'm sig of sicknatures!"
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