"So, Shugart, do you think there's a good storage solution that can replace the hardware storage of the current game cartridge?" Ye Kai reluctantly left his previous ideas behind, only blaming himself for his rise back then, thinking that the floppy drive was a product that would be eliminated sooner or later, so he didn't know much, and this didn't make a foreign appearance today. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

"If you want to store game software without hardware, there are currently two options." Shugart thought for a moment and said. "One is the hard disk, but the current hard disk is not only expensive, but also relatively bulky, obviously not suitable for game consoles, and the other is the LD disc."

Ye Kai knows that LD disc is a laser disc that stores video text in an analog way, not to mention the good and bad of this disc storage technology, Ye Kai only needs to think about the disc with a diameter of 30 cm, and he feels a toothache.

However, Shugart's mention of the disc opened Ye Kai's mind, and Ye Kai remembered that Sony in his previous life finally eliminated the game cards stored in hardware and changed them to disc games.

And now it is the technicians of Philips and Sony who have gathered together to start tackling the problems of CD players, and if the history is true and valid, then in another 3 years, Sony will launch a CD player, the CD Walkman will be launched in a year, and in 10 years, the short-lived MD will appear.

That's right, it's MD, thinking of this, Ye Kai temporarily put aside the problem of game software storage, and thought of something more exciting, that is, the magneto-optical technology used by MD.

In the previous life, the optical disc that used magneto-optical technology had the advantages of small size, no need to install drivers, and large capacity. However, in the end, it was limited by price factors and failed to spread among individual users. However, with its ultra-high security and stability, it is still used by many scientific research, government agencies or advertising companies that use a lot of Macs.

In the past, the optical disc using magneto-optical technology was developed in the early 80s and put into use since 1989, which is the product of the combination of traditional disk technology and modern optical technology. With the rapid upgrading of personal computer hardware equipment, users have put forward higher requirements for mobile storage devices, and magneto-optical discs have entered the market.

The magneto-optical disc uses the combination of optical and magnetic to realize the repeated writing of data, and the size of the magneto-optical disc is similar to that of a three-inch floppy disk, which can be read and written more than 10 million times. At the same time, the disc also comes with a protective case, so the disc is better than the CD-R/RW in many aspects.

What's more important is its storage capacity, which is much larger than that of floppy disks, generally the storage capacity of 3-inch floppy disks is 1.44MB, while the storage capacity of magneto-optical discs can reach several hundred MB, which is the same as the capacity of 8 cm CD discs, reaching 230M, and it can be carried as easily as floppy disks. Compared to floppy disks, magneto-optical disks are not "squeamish" at all, they are not affected by magnetic fields (it uses magneto-optical properties to store data), they are subject to general pressure, and they do not affect the reliability of their data, which is much better than floppy disks.

At the same time, the magneto-optical disc drive can be accessed at any time like an ordinary hard disk, and the software can even be run directly on the disc. It's just that the reading speed of optical discs is not as fast as that of hard disks, but the use effect is quite satisfactory compared to floppy disks, because it can store graphics, image files, and large database files just like hard disks.

In addition, magneto-optical discs are used for vertical recording, and the storage density can be as high as 1.5×10□ bits per square centimeter, which is 4,000 times that of magnetic tapes and 1,000 times that of video tapes, and can be recorded, played, and erased. Because there is no mechanical contact, the service life is more than 10□ times, and the storage life is more than 10 years. Magneto-optical discs are used in high-capacity electronic computers and large-capacity television broadcasting, and are also used as home television records.

At present, in the era when the hard disk can not be popularized into the personal computer, using the magneto-optical disc as the hard disk of the computer is the best choice, because the DOS system running in the current computer is inserted into the boot disk after each boot, that is, the DOS system disk, and the DOS system is loaded into memory from the boot disk, so that the system runs directly in the memory.

In the era when hardware is expensive and the operating system is bought hardware and free software, the consequence of running the DOS system directly in memory is that the programmer can only operate on less than 1MB of memory. DOS only allows 640 KB of memory space (the other 348 KB is reserved for ROMBIOS and other cards), and large programs larger than 640 KB cannot be run under DOS.

As for why computer manufacturers do not install larger capacity memory as the memory of the computer, one is because the memory is expensive, and the other is because the memory used on the PC is a piece of IC, in order for it to serve the PC, it must be soldered to the motherboard, but this also brings problems to the later maintenance, so simply save some use.

Secondly, before the release of the 286 motherboard, the expensive memory with a single capacity was not valued by the world, so the memory directly solidified on the motherboard had a single capacity of only 64~256KB. However, the performance and capacity of this memory were sufficient for the processing needs of the software programs at that time.

However, with the imminent launch of Carrot's '286' and the Windows operating system that Ye Kai envisioned, Ye Kai's idea of loading the operating system without a hard disk, Ye Kai's vision is still equal to zero.

And the hard disk to appear on the personal computer, it needs to wait until the end of the 80s, that is, when Intel's 486 chip came out in the previous life, in some high-end computers to see his expensive figure, 3.25-inch hard disk capacity is only about a pitiful 20M.

Therefore, there is only one choice left for Ye Kai now, that is, to develop magneto-optical disc technology, which took almost 9 years from research and development to application in the previous life, and the manpower and material resources spent during this period are simply astronomical.

And Ye Kai happens to have a relatively one-sided understanding of this aspect, the magneto-optical disc is made of an alloy of terbate ferrite and cobalt. Magneto-optical discs rely on the Kerr effect for reading. In the Kerr effect, linearly polarized light is refracted under the influence of a magnetic field and distorts the polarization plane. The magneto-optical method changes the magnetic field characteristics of tiny areas on the surface of the disc, so the reflection of the laser beam when reading the disc is different from the unchanged area in the changed area.

When writing to the disc, the laser beam is focused at a very small point, and when the alloy is heated to a specific temperature (called the Curie point temperature), the ferromagnetic properties of the elementary particles that line it up are lost. On the other side of the disk there is an electromagnet that changes the polarity of the particles, and the difference is compiled into binary data and stored.

As a result, magneto-optical discs are read by laser beams, and like other optical media such as DVDs and other forms of CD, they are far more reliable than hard disks and floppy disks. The only drawback is that data stored in an environment with strong magnetic fields can be damaged.