the most helpful reply I've had in this forum, I really appreciate your response, THANKS!
strykeroz:
That's not strictly speaking true, as I wouldn't expect you'd want to have all the patches loaded simultaneously. It is certainly 1,344 values to store, but that's an important distinction because if you offload them to PROGMEM or EEPROM, or SD card or any of these options you are looking into, there is no need to have them stored in variables. Far more likely you'd only load one patch into a single set of variables when required. Hope that makes sense.
You are spot on about the way I want it to work. From now on I'll make a distinction between variables and values, might help my questioning!
Thanks for confirming my memory findings, looks like PROGMEM is defo not the way to go!
strykeroz:
Laktica:
any ideas on the limits of the Mega in layman's terms, i.e how many ints can you work with in one go?Well here's where it's not so straightforward. The size of RAM required to run any program changes during the run of the code. This is impacted by the flow of the program, what functions are called, and variables being created within functions and then destroyed when the functions end. The best I can advise here is to avoid putting big data structures into your code in global scope as it is the most scarce resource you have to play with.
Sorry this way a bit of an afterthought vague question! I realize its not particularly answerable now!
The reason I was asking about this and the " 'dumping' and 'loading' from eprom<>SRAM on 'startup' and 'shutdown' " idea is because, while the sequencer is running I don't want an glitches in ITS timing, if vales take a few seconds to save/load that's fine as long as it doesn't affect the overall timing counter. So maybe temp vars in SRAM until the sequencer is stopped is the only solution to this, I'll investigate.
For EPROM you mentioned "Depending on the frequency you'd be expecting patches to be written, that could be quite acceptable." but I don't see why, Is it because during the 1/3 sec the sketch can't do anything else (i.e. the sequencer timing will stutter) or are you relating to the actual data incoming/outgoing buffering issues with the EPROM? If its the latter I don't see it being a problem as I'll only want to save patches now and again, if its the former I will have to investigate some sort of 'SRAM buffer' as I mentioned above.
thanks again.