Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 Forums

[RWAP]

Well, I for one would like to know how the process works. How many interfaces do you need ordered to justify running an order? 100? I would like to learn more about this. I don't plan on running a business like you do but I really want to see things like the TS2068 twister board available for sale at a decent price (say, 20 to 25USD +shipping). Maybe that's why Sintech hasn't sold the MB03 yet. The price is extremely high (even for a collector like me) and they say that it won't be lower unless they get a certain number of people interested in it.

You are talking of about £5,000 to get tooling etc set up (with no design work on the manufacturer's part) and that would cover maybe 100 boards - after that the price is quite cheap per board.

For the Spectrum market, this makes sense.

But for any other market it is hard to justify the initial expense !!

[BrunoFlorindo]

Of course that's also an option, but how did you guys solve the problem of flashing something that occupies the entire ram?

The only reason why we're still using rs232 or the joystick port (I still think the joystick port idea was awesome) is because of the size of code blocks we're sending to the Sinclair side.

[siggi]

Of course that's also an option, but how did you guys solve the problem of flashing something that occupies the entire ram?

I would say: it's a design fault to use a flash memory, which could only be erased/programmed in blocks bigger than the ram is

Kai uses in his ZX2000 a 512kB (that is bigger than the ZX2000 ram!) flash to hold programs, which is programmed in 512 byte blocks (or 256???).
I use in my laptop a 32KB (as 4x8K pages) EEPROM, which is programmed byte per byte.



Siggi