Re: Soft game settings vs. dipswitches?

Roger my friend ;-)
from the Xicor page you can see that:
• High Reliability —Endurance: 1 Million Cycles
—Data Retention: 100 Years

Let's look at the "wear-out" factor of the eeprom in this device. If you
turn your machine on/off 1 time every day (I'm sure you're not with this
frequency, but it's an example,) then at 1 million cycles we're looking at
an endurance of around 2700 years...LOL.

-anders ;-)

At 02:22 PM 4/5/00 -0500, you wrote:
>The problem here is that the "10 year" battery life scares some of the
>collectors and that EEPROM wears out. So what you need is something that
>doesn't wear out and has no battery. And if you throw in nostalgia value also
>that only leaves one thing---magnetic core memory! (Running for cover at high
>speed!)
>
>
>Clay Cowgill wrote:
>
> > > 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.
> >
> > "My car gets thirty rands to the hogshead and that's the way I like it!"
> >
> > > By the way - have you looked at Ramtron's ferroelectric RAM (FRAM)
> > >parts for this kind of thing?
> >
> > Actually I've talked to them for stuff at work (didn't work out-- too
> low of
> > density, too expensive, and not enough volume production).
> >
> > The main issue in this case is that the memory that does the saving is the
> > same stuff that's shadowed over the regular RAM area-- the CPU is actually
> > using the "save" RAM as page 0 and page 1 for the 6520. (So that means
> most
> > of your game variables and all the stack. It'll get hit thousands of times
> > a second.)
> >
> > I'm just using an ST MK48Z02. (Zeropower SRAM) Cheap and available with
> > second sources. The battery is built-in, so ten years down the road people
> > will just have to replace it. I'll socket it to make it easy. On the cool
> > "geek" factor list it gives me the option to drop in one of their
> > "timekeeper" versions and have a realtime clock too. (Ooooh-- high scores
> > with the time and date it was set! ;-)
> >
> > -Clay
> > ______________________________________________________
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>
>--
>Windows:
>
>32 bit graphical interface for a
>16 bit patch for an
>8 bit operating system written for a
>4 bit processor by a
>2 bit company that can't stand
>1 bit of competition.
>
>
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Received on Wed Apr 5 16:47:17 2000