Plug-n-Play for vintage machines?

[Jim Brain]

der Mouse wrote:
>
>
> Personally, I prefer jumpers to soft config for two reasons.
>
> One is that soft config is approximately never documented; it's always
> "just run the supplied program" (never mind that I don't have the
> for-pay OS that's the only one it runs under and in some cases don't
> even have the CPU architecture it's for in the machine).
>   
I'm not a fan of jumperless cards in PCs, for the reasons you note.  
But, on the PC, you rarely need to modify those settings once 
configured.  In the situations I am considering, that's just not an 
option.  And, the number of jumpers I would need to include would be 
daunting in some scenarios (a large RAM cart with UART and Terminal 
Emulator ROM)
> This one can be addressed by having a real hardware switch of some sort
> (such as a jumper) that acts as a write enable.  People for whom the
> convenience outweighs the security can leave it set writes-enabled
> permanently; people like me who go the other way can use it to
> write-protect except when deliberately trying to reconfig.
>   
This is a good idea, and I think I can support this.