Some more modern RAM boards get around this by allowing you to 'read disable' a corrupt RAM bank.One situation which concerns me slightly is battery-backed sideways RAM, where if you happened to load something into sideways RAM which isn't compatible with the machine, and locks it up on the next reset, how do you get out of that? (Presumably you have to power off, and press a switch to turn off the battery temporarily?) An SRWIPE type command would be very useful in that situation, if you can actually get to a command prompt.
For example, on my new IntegraB V2 board, I have implemented a special 'recovery mode' (via a long press of BREAK) that temporarily disables the reading of all RAM banks during recovery mode initialisation. The only banks that get read during this initialisation are the 4 ROM banks under the keyboard. As a minimum, BASIC and file system ROM should be plugged into these sockets. Once in recovery mode (with BASIC & file system active) it is then possible to read and wipe any or all 16 RAM banks (using some special switching to access the RAM banks that are normally mapped to the currently in-use ROM slots under the keyboard). Once you've cleared the corrupt bank, a standard BREAK will get you normal access to the RAM banks again.
Oh, and the IBOS ROM also supports *SRWIPE for normal clearing of RAM banks.
Statistics: Posted by KenLowe — Wed Nov 27, 2024 12:44 pm
