Kuma
£29.95
One of the first things any programmer will
require is a set of utilities and the first of these to become
available in the U.K. is the Kuma Ramdisk. A Ramdisk allows a
portion of memory to be set aside and protected for use as a 'disk
drive'. All the usual functions of a drive can be used such as
saving, copying, deleting files etc. but at phenomenal speed and
without ending up with a lot of junk on your disks. Chunks of code
can be worked on, saved to Ramdisk, tidied up and committed to
floppy disk only when completed. 8-bit users will not have
appreciated the power of a Ramdisk unless they have the 130XE but
there is no denying that the Ramdisk is a very useful utility.
K-RAM allows you to set up any number of Ramdisks,
depending on memory, and to configure these to whatever size you
wish. Each ramdisk created will have its own icon on screen which
can be used in the same way as existing icons. When first run K-ram
indicates how much memory is available and allocates a default of
half of this for the first ramdisk. You may change this to any
reasonable figure or do the opposite by telling K-RAM how much
memory you require to reserve for your program and it will allocate
the rest as the ramdisk. To install multiple ramdisks you merely run
the program again.
With TOS on disk only 162k of memory is available
and the use of multiple ramdisks is fairly restricted but once TOS
is on ROM K-RAM will allow programmers great flexibility. An
additional facility allows you to toggle the write verify to the
floppy disk thus allowing writes to disk to occur nearly 50% faster
whilst more advanced users can customise the BIOS parameter block
that KRAM uses to change the size of the directory area giving more
disk space or alternatively allowing more file names to be held in
the directory.
Programmers will find that K-RAM fits nicely into
their utility library.
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