Other System Software
Advanced User’s Guide
5-7
Drive
D
can be used for short-term data storage. Programs that need to be
loaded into memory and then removed from memory quickly can also be
located there. The drive can also be used for scratch disk space or temporary
files.
The Falcon preserves the data on drive
D
between warm or cold boots by
checking for an existing RAM disk. However, only minimal checking is
performed on any disk that is found; if something happens to a unit and data
integrity becomes questionable, use the CHKDSK utility to detect and correct
errors on drive
D
. (
Chkdsk.com
does not come installed on the Falcon.
Download it using XFER or the Falcon Configuration Utility.)
Additional Drives
On Falcon models
32x
,
33x
, and
34x
, additional RAM disks may be created. If
the Falcon Configuration Utility is used for this, it will appear as Drive
E
.
The Falcon can be configured to use an ATA flash card. The PC card looks like
a hard disk drive to the operating system and the user. More flexible than flash
disk drive
C
, it can be used for safer and more permanent bulk storage of batch
data than the RAM disk (drive
D
).
Additional drives could also be a peer-to-peer or client-server network drive
that is accessed through an RF or Ethernet network card link. This option
allows the developer to make many network drives (drives
E
,
F
, etc.) available
to applications.
Other System Software
BIOS and DOS
The Falcon uses a modified version of General Software’s BIOS with
Datalight’s ROM-DOS. Both products are burned into system flash in a single
256K image. The
A
drive is included in the image, physically addressed just
below the BIOS image.
ROM-DOS uses the Datalight
command.com
processor. This processor is
fully Microsoft 6.2 compatible, except that it occupies about half the space in
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