Issues related to work in #59

[avivace]

Some more points about the work merged in #59 , raised by @ISSOtm :

For example, "this is a ROM and SRAM" is very much unclear
[11:01 PM]
There is at least one sentence beginning without uppercase
[11:02 PM]
The first line of "Echo RAM" is too long and confusing
[11:03 PM]
The IO reg table is still redundant
[11:03 PM]
The part about "returning" from FExx should mention that reads return $FF, and that writes are ignored as well

[avivace]

@ISSOtm can you help me on this?

[avivace]

@ISSOtm you initially raised concerns on this. I'm closing this in a couple of days if I don't hear from you.

[ISSOtm]

I'm starting work on this again, including fixing formatting. On which of the following did we agree?

• 16kB
• 16 kB
• 16KiB
• 16 KiB

[AntonioND]

I vote for 16 KiB

[aaaaaa123456789]

16 KB should be the best. But did we ever agree on this?

[ISSOtm]

kB or KiB, actually. There was an argument about standardizing on one—I think in #54?

[AntonioND]

In the case of the GB it's actually even more confusing because the CPU frequency is exactly 4 MiHz, but people normally say 4 MHz as an approximation.

Defining 1000 = 1024 decades ago was a mistake that even hard drive manufacturers take advantage of, we don't need to make the same mistakes.

[aaaaaa123456789]

For units of things other than information, SI prefixes are universally accepted and the value shouldn't be quoted as 4 MHz in reference material. (In fact, it should be quoted as 4,194,304 Hz explicitly (and perhaps even as 2²² Hz in a comment); the long trailing decimal places have obscured the power of two to many people.)
On the other hand, KB, MB, GB for 2¹⁰, 2²⁰, 2³⁰ bytes are almost universal, with few exceptions (not including people who intentionally want to make quantities seem larger). Whenever someone talks about a ROM being 1 MB, they invariably mean that the file is $100000 bytes long, not $F4240.

[aaaaaa123456789]

kB or KiB, actually. There was an argument about standardizing on one—I think in #54?

It seems like the debate was in #55.

[Rangi42]

The binary prefixes Ki-, Mi-, etc, are 100% unambiguous. "KB, MB, GB for 2¹⁰, 2²⁰, 2³⁰" used to be more common, but hard drives' advertised space and even OS-displayed file sizes (macOS and some Linux distros) are now the smaller 10-based quantities.

[aaaaaa123456789]

I see them as pointless clutter. (And I have no idea of why macOS and those Linux distros would make such a bad choice; the decimal file size is virtually always less relevant than the binary file size, even to the average user.) Virtually everyone who uses the "old" units still means their binary quantities; I have yet to see anyone talking about a 2.1 MB ROM or a 4.1 KB WRAM bank.

[Rangi42]

It's not even an entirely recent inconsistency. The common "1.44 MB" floppy disk size held 1,474,560 bytes: 1.44 × 1024 × 1000.