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Author Topic: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)  (Read 10313 times)

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Offline Zac67

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #29 from previous page: March 24, 2010, 09:53:09 PM »
I know there are quite a few PICs out there auto-sensing Z III or Z II. There are designed to work that way, Usually Z2 functionality is somewhat reduced and performance is lower.

However, designing a 'large' RAM card in that manner wouldn't really make sense as Z2 could only make use of a tiny fraction of the memory. As joetee suggested, including a way to use it for fast mass storage would somewhat make sense, but there are more common and much cheaper solutions available for that - why increase manufacturing and/or development cost?
 

Offline TrevorDick

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #30 on: March 25, 2010, 01:13:46 PM »
Well done Matthew.  Put me down for some! ;-)

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Offline VingtTrois

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #31 on: March 25, 2010, 01:24:19 PM »
Quote from: Crumb;549495
@VingtTrois

IRC expansion.library had some bug that had to be fixed to allow that.


What ? Do you have more information about that (link...) ? Thx a lot.


Quote from: Zac67;549500
Even the towers have no more than 5 slots, so you're maxing out at 1.25 GB. But I'm sure there are several problems before you get that high. X-ray's tried 3x DKB3128 but only got up to 512 MB:
http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=2741


I will ask to AmigaKit to send me 7 units of ZorRAM for testing on my A3000 Towerised :crazy:
Then I'd do the tests when the firefighters will be at home.
-A3K(T)040@35MHz/78MB/KS3.1/OS3.9/Buster11/PICASSO II/GVP IO/A2088XT/DENEB/HDD18GB
-A3K(D)030@25MHz/134MB RAM/KS3.1/OS3.9/Buster11/RETINA Z2/OKTAGON 2008/VLAB YC/MIDI/DKB3128/HDD18GB
-A2K/ROM 1.3-3.1/2MBCHIP/8MB/A2091/OKTAGON 2008/A2058/TANDEM IDE/FlickerFixer-Scandoubler/Genlock
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Offline mboehmer_e3b

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #32 on: March 26, 2010, 10:44:34 PM »
Quote from: whiteb;549264

but read what David Hayne tells us about it.


Which is not the whole story, I'm afraid. We had one customer with DMA problems on Buster 11, and during development of the ZorRAM it turned out that an (up to now unknown) Buster 11 bug exists.

This bug will hit if DMA on Zorro III is used and heavy load on Zorro III exists. This situation is likely in systems with no CPU card RAM and Zorro III RAM, as well as one (allowed) Zorro III busmaster in action (like the DENEB). It was not found AFAIK up to now as heavy load on Zorro III was not likely and only few DMA cards are available (Fastlane Z3 and A4091).

This is - to emphasize it - not a problem of DENEB DMA operation, but the Buster DMA arbiter itself, which partially locks up.
A new firmware for DENEB is under test - it recognizes this lockup and will take appropriate action to "unlock" the Buster11 arbiter again.
First tests are promising.

On Buster 11 you can only operate *one* Zorro III busmaster, and as long as this is a DENEB you have no problems, as you may use PIO instead DMA, or take the new firmware with a fix.
With Fastlane Z3 or A4091 you may have problems as they are not capable of fixing this bug.

Michael
 

Offline joetee

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #33 on: March 27, 2010, 06:22:57 AM »
Quote from: save2600;549545
I think he might have meant if it were a Zorro II card, that it should work in a Zorro III slot. That would be a logical assumption, but not the other way around. Else why have different standards?  :lol:

@Joetee... are you talking about BigWolf out East? Is he still selling Miggy stuff I wonder?


The Wolf I was thanking is Mr. Wolf Dietrich of Phase5 (& Gerald Carda Too!).
I just wanted to give my compliment to the designers of products that have most impressed me.  AmigaOS's RAD: has saved thousands of developers a ton of time!

The only thing faster re-booting from RAD: is Umithlon, using RAD: but I guess thats cheating since thats from a CtrlAmigaAmiga "soft boot" (after Umithlon booted Linux from the HDD to run the emulator SW first) not cold, from a true HW reset.  Thats why it only takes 3 seconds...

RAD: is faster because booting from the south-bridge HW is skipped, and the North-bridge HW is faster and ready to go.

I'll check my BigRAM32 developer notes, but since this an Amiga design, almost everything is forward and backwards compatible.  An Amiga Z3 bus should tolerate any Z2 card - even though I/O to/from the PIC will slow the Z3 traffic way down.

I'm sorry I even mentioned alternative uses for it - I just know that most every piece of Commodore/Amiga/3rd party HW ever made has had soft&hardware hacks added to it after it was sold in original specification form.
....especially if it has EEPROM/CPLD/FPGA's on it!*  
 I should not have wondered on-line about using ZorRAM as a ramdisk for Z2 systems.
I have always considered it rude, and in poor form, for a hardware person who is not (currently) offering any products to inject there own features into another's product, or to assume that they know better than the one who is actually prototyping a product NOW, to sell tomorrow.  In fact, I was flat out wrong to wonder about using its memory as a RAD:, because it has to configure as vanilla RAM to ever even mount a file-system geometry of blocks into it.

 I VERY MUCH appreciate anyone who continues innovate Amiga products, and I vote with my wallet: I'm going to buy at least two ZorRAMs, and I will gladly pre-order them to satiate the developers' bean-counters in the mean time.

*Providing a 10 pin J-TAG port on HW products is VERY SEXY!
Joe Torre .  . ...X Hardware Engineer @ Amiga Inc... .  .
 

Offline Protek

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #34 on: April 20, 2010, 08:51:37 PM »
This is indeed excellent news! : D I already placed an order for one card. I was planning to get a 040 turbo with RAM at some point but now I can stick with my A3640 card.
A4000/040 3.1/3.1, 2 MB Chip, 24 MB Fast, Piccolo SD64 2MB, GVP A2000mHC+8 Rev2, 4 GB CF HD via CF IDE
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Offline amigakitTopic starter

Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #35 on: April 20, 2010, 11:14:02 PM »
Thanks for the order !
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Offline arnljot

Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #36 on: April 20, 2010, 11:52:53 PM »
I have ordered one too, and if they choose to offer a 256MB version, I´ll order that too.
A posting a day keeps the sanity away...
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Offline Akiko

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #37 on: April 21, 2010, 12:00:42 AM »
@Amigakit

I'm tempted, any chance this product will support OS4 classic in future?
 

Offline Crumb

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #38 on: April 21, 2010, 12:57:10 AM »
Quote from: VingtTrois;549631
What ? Do you have more information about that (link...) ? Thx a lot.

I remember a thread here or at aw.net about somebody using various DKB3128. On the other hand it may be a Fastlane/DKB3128 bug. If the bug appeared you could always burn a new rom with a fixed expansion.library, scsi.device and other goodies :-)

Check out this: http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=417621&postcount=25

Tron2k2 wrote:
Quote from: Tron2k2
Here's the answer from Dean Brown, creator of the DKB RAM board: There's a bug in Commodore's expansion.library. When he made the boards he tested them by sticking a bunch of 'em in a 3000, and found this problem. He notified Commodore, but it was too low on their to-do list. Remember, this was when 128MB RAM was SPENDY. C= didn't see this situation happening enough to warrant fixing it, and of course they later went under before it could be fixed.

That's how Dean explained it to me, anyway :-)
« Last Edit: April 21, 2010, 01:05:04 AM by Crumb »
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Offline Crumb

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #39 on: April 21, 2010, 01:01:20 AM »
@michael

Do you plan to develop a bugfixed buster replacement that also runs faster? I think many ZorroIII users would be interested. Deneb must be quite more complex than Buster11 and you probably know more about ZorroIII than David Haynie! :-D
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Offline Crumb

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #40 on: May 25, 2010, 01:43:56 PM »
Quote from: amigakit;548943
AmigaKit.com is pleased to announce ZorRAM, a new modern memory card for Zorro 3 Amiga computers.

The new card will be supplied with 128MB of SDRAM memory as standard.  It features a low profile Zorro card and has full Autoconfig support.


I have noticed that there's now a 256MB version available. Do you have some news about OS4/MorphOS compatibility?
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Offline chusete

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #41 on: May 25, 2010, 02:22:41 PM »
I'll buy one (256 Mb version) when it works with OS4.0 or Morphos.
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Offline Zac67

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #42 on: May 25, 2010, 09:21:43 PM »
Not at all sure about Z3 RAM being of any use for the PPC in MOS/OS4 ... The point is that expansion RAM as well as onboard would be so DEAD slow that you probably wouldn't enjoy it a lot. It'd be nice if AmigaKit could give us a hint here, but I'm pretty confident that it's of no use. :(
 

Offline Crumb

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Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #43 on: May 25, 2010, 09:34:20 PM »
Quote from: Zac67;560961
Not at all sure about Z3 RAM being of any use for the PPC in MOS/OS4 ... The point is that expansion RAM as well as onboard would be so DEAD slow that you probably wouldn't enjoy it a lot. It'd be nice if AmigaKit could give us a hint here, but I'm pretty confident that it's of no use. :(


It's better being able to run programs more slowly than watching how your system crashes due to lack of ram.

Keep in mind people use 040 boards with motherboard ram... slowness of motherboard&Z3 ram is greatly exaggerated. It's not as fast as cpu ram but it's not useless.
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Offline TjLaZer

Re: ZorRAM SDRAM Memory Card (www.amigakit.com)
« Reply #44 on: May 25, 2010, 11:55:58 PM »
Quote from: Zac67;560961
Not at all sure about Z3 RAM being of any use for the PPC in MOS/OS4 ... The point is that expansion RAM as well as onboard would be so DEAD slow that you probably wouldn't enjoy it a lot. It'd be nice if AmigaKit could give us a hint here, but I'm pretty confident that it's of no use. :(


Exactly, this is for old school Amiga OS 3.x use and not for PPC and OS 4.  Its too slow.  I will be buying a 256MB one soon!

Have many in stock AmigaKit?  Do I need to hurry?  $210 is a lot right now so I need to save up a bit...
Going Bananas over AMIGAs since 1987...

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