Denial

Hello All,
I have a Ramdisk 64 Cartridge made by P Technologies. When I plug it into the vic and turn it on
it acts like I have a 16kb ram cart plugged in as it reports 19xxx bytes free on the boot screen.

Supposedly this cartridge is made to be used as a disk drive, allowing you to save and load programs
via device number and wont loose the information in it if you reset your computer.

I found an ad in a Torpet mag from back In the day making these claims but in the ad it says it comes
with software. Afaik, I never did get software with mine or the adapter .

I realize its supposed to be for the c64 but the card edge connector is Vic-20.

The adapter they show in the Torpet ad picture will allow you to plug this into a c64 but it just doesn't look like its
wide enough to accommodate that.

Does anyone have or knows where to find the software for this Cartridge?

Here is a pic of the cartridge:
https://postimg.org/image/4hdo6u3kj/

and here is a pic of the Torpet ad:
https://postimg.org/image/8qwtjr5w3/

And here is a pic of the cartridge board:
https://postimg.org/image/4j21b04gj/

Thanks
Leo

Interesting, don't know where you will find the software or if it will work without the user port piece. Good luck.

According to the ad its device 15. What happens if you try load"$",15? does it load a directory?

I wonder what they exactly meant with "system reset" in the ad text. It's not exactly a synonim of "power off".

Having looked at the chipset it looks like it is 8x 64kx1bit chips plus some logic for addressing.

Without an eprom it would probably need software loading to set it up as device 15.

highinfidelity wrote:I wonder what they exactly meant with "system reset" in the ad text. [...]

They mean the reset performed by any of those reset buttons available for the user port, IEC port, on a cartridge, (re-)triggered by the 555 timer on the mainboard, etc. A power cycle would of course clear the RAM, unless the memory happened to be something like battery-backed SRAM (which isn't the case here).

I suppose you didn't get the sense of my message. It is obvious that it will loose all data at power off, but in the ad they're making believe that this memory expansion acts like a fast mass storage device, "forgetting" for a while to mention (whoops!) that it's volatile. I can only pity those who actually used it for spreadsheeting (as suggested in the ad) and found out later that the work of a full day was gone with the click of the switch.

The advertised cartridge by far was not the only RAM disk that was available at that time.

I'd suppose it was common knowledge then, that RAM disks are volatile unless explicitly stated so in the spec. They wrote "system reset" and not "power cycle" so I don't see any deviousness on their side.

I also suppose it is a positive statement to write that data is retained on a system reset - which simply means the RAM disk file system checks for valid data first in that RAM when it's initialised (or reinitialised in case the it was necessary to reset the computer beforehand, because - for example - there was an application crash) and does not simply clear the RAM beforehand, while it's being started up.

Frankly Mike, I would have been an "average user" back then, and basing only on the ad, I would have bought it as a "fast alternative" to the 1541, i.e. "as a second disk drive" as stated in the ad. If I didn't read this thread, I'd think I could use the RAM disk as a storage device in all senses, even nowadays. I bet it was not so common knowledge that RAM disks are volatile, but I may be wrong ("below-average" user ).

Same here I'm afraid. Had I purchased this object back then, it would have ranked as a top peak of disappointment.

@orion70, @highinfidelity: So be it then.

At least the notion that computer data storage need not necessarily be non-volatile (contrary to paper office files) should have occured to anyone at that time when the computer was switched off and didn't retain the type-in unless it was stored to tape or disk.

RAM was expensive anyway in the early 80ies, and from what I know RAM disks were always considered as fast storage medium for temporary work files - say during development of programs, the files themselves not thought eligible to be stored permanently. Alternatively, a game could transfer the level files for quick access from disk to RAM disk and later load the data from RAM disk instead. Or, for example as buffer for disk copying. Etc.

Those are also the envisioned uses for the FE3 RAM disk Kananga wrote a few years ago. From some of the questions raised in that thread I should have deducted, that the very concept of a RAM disk really seems to be alien to some people.


Edit: here's the entry for RAM drive in Wikipedia, and to quote from there:

Wikipedia wrote:[...] Because the storage is in RAM, it is volatile memory, which means it will be lost in the event of power loss, whether intentional (computer reboot or shutdown) or accidental (power failure or system crash). This is, in general, a weakness (the data must periodically be backed up to a persistent-storage medium to avoid loss), but is sometimes desirable: for example, when working with a decrypted copy of an encrypted file. [...]

I wonder about the expansions content. It doesn't sound like the Ramdisk64 in the ad (which was also for the C64), and the discrete logic suggests it is controlled directly, probably by some poke commands.

If you could photograph the backside, it might be possible to draw some schematic of the pcb layout. From that, we may get some insight into how the logic is supposed to work?