[Oberon] SD Card File Exchange (was: Why is RSC string data word-aligned?)

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> Skulski, Wojciech
> Sent: Monday, 1 February 2021 7:00 AM
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Why is RSC string data word-aligned?
> 
> From my user perspective the file system speed optimizations are not
> even secondary. I would rather want to see a convenient file exchange
> between the RISC5 Oberon and Windows workstations. I would like to
> plug the Oberon SD into an SD card reader and easily copy files under
> Windows, from the V4 directory to the SD and vice versa, using the
> usual Windows drag and drop. I would like to do the same between the
> Oberon SD and the emulator.
> 

As you are aware, our HCFiler (high-capacity) software allows you to plug
the Oberon SD card into an SD card reader and copy files to Windows. For the
benefit of others, the original announcement is here:

"HCFiler - An efficient embedded SDHC FileSystem"

https://www.astrobe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=534

The source code that is available to copy the files from the Project Oberon
partition to the HCFiler partition (ALL of the SD card, no matter how big)
is available. It would not be difficult to adapt this to copy files from
Windows to the Project Oberon partition. I would recommend using Gardens
Point Component Pascal as the compiler to do this:

https://www.cfbsoftware.com/gpcp

GPCP and CPIde is what I use daily for all of my Oberon development under
Windows 10.

> I would like to use the entire SD card rather than a small portion of
> it. I do not mind "partitions", if partitions are visible and easily
> used under the emulator, the Windows host, and the Oberon
> workstation. 

> I would like to add Linux and Mac to the list of hosts,
> though I am not using either.
> 

I'll leave it to others to recommend solutions for emulators and Linux and
Mac.

> Present PC link is fine for small files or for the SW development.
> But it is not great for massive file exchange between Oberon and
> hosts, or Oberon and emulators.
> 

Copying files from Windows using HCFiler has not been a high priority for me
as nobody apart from you has asked me for it to date. Is there anybody else
here who is interested?

> Concerning the speed under the Oberon, a boost would be provided with
> the QSPI interface rather than the present SPI interface. 

Point me to documentation on how to access SDHC cards using QSPI and I'll
look into it. I was only aware of MMC as a faster access method. If anybody
has any experience of using MMC with RISC5 I'd be very interested.

Regards,
Chris Burrows
CFB Software
https://www.astrobe.com/RISC5