Removing Data Paks?

[phil8715]

I'm quite new to the Psion Organiser II.

I've got a couple of game packs in the slots, my question is this, although it might seem sound like a daft question.

If I remove the game packs do the games disappear from the organiser? What I mean is when I put the games pack in do they write to the internal drive a? Or am I playing them off the game pack?

Sorry if it sounds like a stupid question.

[Martin]

Phil..

Generally speaking you are playing them off the datapak.

Although most 'program' datapaks write their name to the Top Level Menu and some time you must manually [Del] (delete) this menu item. Some (including some of my data-loggers) write 'stuff' to memory A: which might need to removed manually. Check out the Operating manual (here) its a good read when you are just getting started..

And Consider...

(1) Some professionally produced PSION datapaks automatically remove the menu item from the top level menu (like the Spreadsheet)
(2) Jaap (and other machine code programmers) have written some TSR programmes that Stay Resident in memory after the pack is removed. For example Terry Kitchener's POS2LZ64 patch that converts your P464 into a regular LZ64

Sincerely Martin

[Lostgallifreyan]

Sorry if it sounds like a stupid question.

No such thing... Assumptions may be, but questions, never.

The thing about the Organiser, is it's extremely versatile, and as Martin shows, there are several possibilities, none of them standard. The big limit was always space, all forms of memory were small and expensive at the time, so in general, there will be little or no duplication of code or data, except where the user of the device wants it for their own reasons.

Some program packs will deliberately prevent copying of a pack too, trying to enforce uniqueness of that copy of the code, but there are ways round this, not least backing up of pack images to files on a PC, and restoring them to packs. Changing the way they operate is usually a lot more difficult.

Jaap's site is good for information about how well certain tools (and maybe games) will cohabit with others on the same system. Like any really old computer system, there may be specific versions, even specific orders of adding them to an organiser, for good results, because to get some of the useful actions code was written to use low level services and machine code, and the interaction is often so close that a pack should be considered as a hard disk, i.e. don't try to remove it while there is any chance of it being accessed when you do. RAM packs especially so, but that has to do with the hardware, power surges causing data loss. In general, always turn the Organiser off when removing or adding any pack, just to keep the odds in your favour.