Re: Looking for - Wordperfect

[Bryan Mason <bmason@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:48 AM Friday 10/10/2003, Bill Moy wrote:
> Also, I've been researching about how to boot from PCMCIA cards.  The 
> Poqet PC has this very unusual ability by pressing the Poqet key while 
> booting, bypassing Poqet's ROM DOS v3.3 and booting into DOS5 from slot 
> A.  Normally, other systems cannot do this because configuration files 
> need to setup and initialize PCMCIA slots and services.  Therefore, even 
> if an SRAM card was formatted to boot, a computer normally does not see 
> this boot sector.  So I believe the Poqet has special programs called 
> "pointers" that enable slots and then erases itself from RAM!  Can anyone 
> confirm and if so, can this special file be identified?  I'd like to find 
> out if there are generic pointers that may help override other palmtop 
> system's hard coded boot procedures so that booting from unused PCMCIA 
> slots are possible (overriding the default operating system.)

If I remember correctly, the SRAM cards were simply byte-by-byte copies of 
a floppy disk type format.  The memory space of the card was divided into 
512-byte sectors, just like a floppy disk, and then the BIOS of the Poqet 
PC would accept standard BIOS requests using a cylinder/head/sector 
addressing scheme and would convert that to the memory address 
corresponding to that sector.  The internal ROM drive was addressed the 
same way.

So if the first "sector" of the SRAM card contained a boot record, and the 
rest of the card was formatted like a standard bootable floppy disk, and 
the Poqet Key was pressed during boot, then the BIOS would read the boot 
sector from the SRAM card instead of the boot sector of the internal ROM disk.

Being able to access SRAM cards and booting from SRAM cards were features 
built into the Poqet PC BIOS.  There weren't any sort of external programs 
requried that I'm aware of.

Now, Flash cards on the Poqet PC Plus are a whole different story . . .

-- Bryan
<http://www.bmason.com/PoqetPC/>