Talk:NorthStar Computers

Hard Sector Disks
Can someone explain why using hard-sectored disks would make it difficult to port software to the Horizon? Wouldn't the difference in OS be a more critical issue? Maury 23:45, 15 November 2006 (UTC)


 * The North Star disk controller did not use an expensive LSI floppy disk controller like the Western Digital 1771. Their board was cheaper to produce but depended on the sector pulses being generated by the disk drive' hard sectors. Most of the other systems used the LSI floppy disk controller solution and could use soft sector diskettes. You could not easily interchange diskettes between systems.
 * Here is a link to an early advertisement.
 * -- SWTPC6800 19:17, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Name
The article title uses a space, but the article's text combines the two words. which is it?Kdammers (talk) 04:11, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

end of the company
No-where in the article can i find a date for the end of the company. On the other hand, it is categorized at the bottom of the article as a firm diestablished in 1984. Is there any evidence for that date?Kdammers (talk) 04:13, 4 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Not that I could find, however I did use that date in the lead as I see nothing to suggest another date is better! Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:28, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

Advantage details
The North Star Advantage has 20KiB (not 16!) of VRAM (no parity). Yes, this required using two 16k banks (i.e. half the 16bit address space) if you wanted to map all of it in at once. The mapper internally had an 18bit address space, most of which was unallocated or mirrored. I'm not sure the canonical way to cite that, but I have a copy of the technical reference manual here: http://www.accela.net/lucca/advtech.pdf; see page 1-8:

"Memory         64K byte Main RAM                 20K byte Display RAM                 2K byte Boot PROM"

See also Table 3-1 on page 3-2 detailing the 18bit address layout the mapper uses to fit in the z80's 16bit address space. Happy to provide lots more details, not sure that meets the bar for relevance though.

Lashtear (talk) 23:23, 30 August 2019 (UTC)