Re: Soft game settings vs. dipswitches?

On Mon, 03 Apr 2000 21:42:28 PDT, you wrote:

>In a multigame system, can anyone think of a particularly good reason why I
>should *not* make the game configuration all "soft-set" by just putting the
>game settings up in a menu area of the multigame software and just let the
>user make settings there? I have battery backed-up RAM (that should be good
>for 10+ years) that I can store settings in.
>
>I can't really think of any downside to it but maybe I'm missing
>something...

        Other than the possible "nostalgia value" of doing it "the
old-fashioned way" instead of using "them new-fangled menus", I don't see
any disadvantage to it. In fact, considering that different games
undoubtedly have widely-varying DIP-switch assignments (and probably a
different number of switches themselves), I'd think trying to keep the
physical DIP-switch system would create a fair amount of confusion when
trying to switch from one game to another...

        By the way - have you looked at Ramtron's ferroelectric RAM (FRAM)
parts for this kind of thing? They're non-volatile RAMs that are, IMO,
_much_ nicer than either battery-backed SRAM or EEPROMs - for one thing,
they have a read/write endurance of 1^10 (that's 10 _billion_) cycles;
you'd have to access it over 30 times a second to wear it out in a mere 10
years... :) Check 'em out at www.ramtron.com .
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solarfox@DON'TMESSWITHtexas.net (Gary Akins jr.)
http://lonestar.texas.net/~solarfox
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Received on Tue Apr 4 08:44:38 2000