ZorRam - new memory board for Zorro 3

[Zac67]

Just throw a battery on the RAM board and call it done.

(S)DRAM uses quite a bit of power, plus you'll need the controller to continue refreshing. Anything beyond a couple of minutes would increase the price to no-go regions.

[Zac67]

With an adapter would it work with an A500, if it were configured to work in ZII mode?

A slingshot hack should put any ZII bord to use on a 500. But before spending serious amounts of money on it you might want to consider a 1200.

[trekiej]

@ Save2600
There is always hope, lol.
ooh ooh ooh oooh gimme gimme gimme

[trekiej]

@Zac67
I do have an A1200, I guess Elbox still makes memory upgrades for it.

[save2600]

A slingshot hack should put any ZII bord to use on a 500. But before spending serious amounts of money on it you might want to consider a 1200.

He'll just end up spending serious amounts of money on his A1200 then.  :lol:

When I had a slingshot hooked to my A500, boy was all that stuff unsightly. Before I sold it though, came up with the idea of hollowing out a C= 1541 drive for the Slingshot/A2091/CDF Card combo. Actually tried it and looked a lot nicer than seeing all that bare circuit board garbage and wiring! Wasn't a half bad idea if I do say so myself.  lol

[Trev]

(S)DRAM uses quite a bit of power, plus you'll need the controller to continue refreshing. Anything beyond a couple of minutes would increase the price to no-go regions.

What? Don't shoot down my poorly thought out suggestion. ;-) You could push battery life into hours, but you'd need live standby power for normal operation when the system is "off." If your system has been equipped with an ATX power supply, you could pull it from there. The downside, I guess, is that the memory board will be pulling power at all times. That's no different than every other device in the house, though: TV, STB, etc.

[Ratte]

Buy a SSD-Drive ...
ZoRAM is a memory-expansion and not a harddrive-replacement.

I like to see a enhanced 512MB version, anyone else ?!

[cv643d]

Depends on the price but yes, 512 MB would be sweet (what would I use it for though? ).

[Zac67]

@Trev

Why don't you just use some readily available & cheap CF card as recoverable 'RAM' disk?

[Zac67]

I like to see a enhanced 512MB version, anyone else ?!

Wonder what the price might be - if they work out the 128 MB for 99€, the 256 MB for... 149€? 179€? Would be really sweet if E3B could include spare CAS lines to piggy-back another set of RAMs later... :hammer:

[dreamcast270mhz]

Nice! 128mb ram limit in the cpu slot has been conquered! But why not 512mb? that would be easy, as the Z3 bus supports 512mb per slot, buy 2 and you have 1GB! I don't understand however why they just don't add a slot for the RAM, it would be cheaper to buy and SDRAM is very cheap.

[TjLaZer]

We have tried to limit costs of the card as much as possible so I estimate that the card will cost around US $135* which is far less than the crazy prices that the DKB 3128 on Ebay can go for.

I will definitely buy one or two!  It would be cool if it had a socket for either a 128MB or 256MB DIMM on it.  But no complaints from me if it does not.  A Z3 Mem card is a welcome addition to the Amiga!

[Zac67]

Nice! 128mb ram limit in the cpu slot has been conquered! But why not 512mb? that would be easy, as the Z3 bus supports 512mb per slot, buy 2 and you have 1GB! I don't understand however why they just don't add a slot for the RAM, it would be cheaper to buy and SDRAM is very cheap.

Z3 supports up to 1 GB AutoConfig size.

[dreamcast270mhz]

Hmm, wikipedia says otherwise, oh well!

[Darrin]

What a great idea!  My A4000 came with a Commodore 4040 CPU card (IIRC) which had nowhere to add extra RAM.  I ended up having to buy a CPU card that could take extra RAM and then transplanted the old card into my A3000 to replace the 68030.  This would have been a great add-on for both machines.

If my A4000 has 64MB on the CPU card then there shouldn't be any problem using the 256MB version in one of my spare Mediator4000 Zorro slots?

[Trev]

@Trev

Why don't you just use some readily available & cheap CF card as recoverable 'RAM' disk?

Actually, I use readily available and cheap x86-compatible hardware for all my mainstream computing tasks, but that's not the point.

Having a battery on the RAM expansion could have other productive uses. A safe write-back disk cache is a good example; however, Amiga users are accustomed to powering off at will. Despite the performance gain, a write-back cache wouldn't be well accepted. It would have to be done as a caching disk controller with a soft power interface and firmware logic to manage cache flushes on startup and shutdown.