Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!erd From: erd@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Ethan R. Dicks) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: rus rumor! Keywords: NIGHTMARES! Message-ID: <16862@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 2 Jul 88 14:47:47 GMT References: <3152@crash.cts.com> <264@cadomin.UUCP> <58141@sun.uucp> <1705@vaxb.calgary.UUCP> <3256@cos.com> Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science Lines: 46 In article <3256@cos.com> srt@cos.UUCP (Stan R. Turner) writes: !In article <1705@vaxb.calgary.UUCP> maloff@calgary.UUCP (Sheldon Maloff) writes: !>I was under the assumption that the Spirit Technologies memory board !>for the a1000 (which I have) has a 2K battery backed up ram on board. !>I say assumption because I haven't looked at the specs lately, but that !>would mean it could be done, no? That memory on the clock is meant !>to hold stuff during power down, and it would make no sense to have !>2K of battery backed up ram only to have it wiped on power up. Then !>again this would be a very limited virus. Yes. There is 2K of battery backed up RAM on a SPIRIT inboard (both 1000 and 500 models, if the 500 model has the clock installed) This RAM is _byte_ wide... very hard to execute ;-) ! Even if a program existed within your 2K ram there is no way that !the CPU would be executing that program unless the virus patched !your operating system to execute the program in non volitile ram. If !it did this then why bother to stick the program in non volitile ram !in the first place. I do not know why a clock needs 2K of battery !backed up ram. ! Anyway that is my 2 cents worth. The RAM is present _on_ the clock chip (the big tall DIP thing on an INBOARD) SPRIT used an off the shelf part which happened to also have battery backed RAM. This part was originally designed for the 650x series microprocessors, which are 8 bit. The clock chip hangs on a bus like 2K of RAM, with the first 10 bytes being overshadowed by clock registers. On the Amiga, I _think_ that is simply looks like the low byte, for 4k of address space. ! !-- !Mail to {decuac,hadron,hqda-ai,uunet}!cos.com!srt (Stanley R. Turner) Hope this clears things up. -ethan -- Ethan R. Dicks | ###### This signifies that the poster is a member in A.C.T | ## good sitting of Inertia House: Bodies at rest. 4320 Tuller Road | ## Dublin OH 43017-9502 | ###### "You get it, you're closer."