dk suchtronics Silicon Disc

Summary

The floppy disk drives of Amstrad/Schneider CPC computers could write 180 KiB per side. Although they were much faster than cassette storage, there was still room for improvement. British accessories company dk’tronics recognised this and introduced the Silicon Disc RAM disk with 64 KiB and 256 KiB. Its hardware is almost identical to the dk’tronics memory expansion, but its ROM gives the Silicon Disc a different function: after booting and activation, a new virtual drive becomes available. The RAM drive integrates into BASIC or CP/M; CP/M+ requires a patch first. Two new BASIC commands transfer data between floppy disk and RAM disk: LOADDISC copies all the contents to the RAM disk, while SAVEDISC writes them back to the floppy. Because the memory is volatile, a crash or reset is particularly inconvenient.

dk’tronics produced versions with 64 KiB and 256 KiB and supported the computers CPC 464/664 and CPC 6128. There are the versions Silicon Disc 0.3, 1.1,1.3 and 2.12. They can be recognized at the start messages “Silicon Disc x.y” after booting. The Silicon Disc can be used perfectly together with the memory extension.

Picture: http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/Dk’tronics_memory_expansion