Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: HammerD on March 21, 2010, 06:30:10 AM
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I haven't seen any news of this here, so check this out:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=21012
Quoted (and translated from German) from A1K.org by Michael Boehmer:
"This card provides a common OEM development of individual computers and on behalf of, E3B amigakit.com (Mathew Leaman) dar. The Zorro III E3B know-how comes from, as the circuit board layout and the extremely slim-SDRAM controller, the know-how comes from individual computers on SDRAM and the manufacturing experience for a high-quality production of the cards at the same time an attractive retail price.
The card (project name "ZorRAM") will be available exclusively at amigakit.
The technical data in brief:
- compact Zorro III card (130x55 mm ^ 2)
- Four-layer PCB
- 128MB or 256MB of fast SDRAM (soldered)
- real 32bit design
- Full support for Autoconfig
- RAM is automatically integrated into the system
- RAM can be "manually" integrated addme /
- low power design
- slender, but faster FPGA for interfacing to Zorro III
- no Zorro II support (makes no sense at 8MB address space) "
(http://www.a1k.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=24453&d=1269103532)
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Nice! Been wondering when a product like this would appear :)
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- slender, but faster FPGA for interfacing to Zorro III
CPLD, not FPGA.
For SDRAM using an FPGA is nice, but overkill.
You can do a SDRAM controller with fully featured Zorro III interface and level shifters in 144 macrocells :-)
Michael
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Cool! :) Hope this get's released and doesn't end up in vapour-land
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Please wait for the official AmigaKit.com announcement on this new product.
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Cool! :) Hope this get's released and doesn't end up in vapour-land
How many announced E3B products ended up there?
Anyhow, it must be released - vapourland has been populized by many other companies, so there's no space left :-) And even if there was... the ZorRAM would be too scared to go there, thinking of all the Sharks and Dragons crouching around...
Michael
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How many announced E3B products ended up there?
Anyhow, it must be released - vapourland has been populized by many other companies, so there's no space left :-) And even if there was... the ZorRAM would be too scared to go there, thinking of all the Sharks and Dragons crouching around...
Michael
None.
You have my confidence :)
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Great to hear that there are more products for the Amiga.
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Wowee!
Thought there'd be a way to do a reasonable SDRAM board...
I'm not holding my breath but this definitely is something to look forward to. Very interested to find out the specs: price, speed compared to onboard RAM, availability.
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This looks very nice indeed and a nice addition to my A3000. Could even be reasonably priced, I guess.
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Any ideas on a price??
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@tajmaster:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=21012
post number 18
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I have wanted one of these for awhile. The extra memory is incredibly useful can't wait to find out the price.
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Cool for ramdisk use.
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I want to be able to use netsurf without worring (too much) about RAM :)
But a ram disk is cool too!:)
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Perhaps one loaded with 4gig would be more fun :) Obviously it would need some kind of DIP switch (or software setting), to set the visible memory window (so as not to chew up all the ZIII address space)... but an Amiga with 4gig... that would be funny :D
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The old 128 meg boards bring a pretty penny on ebay-be good to see an new affordable 128 meg or better.Why not 512 meg?That leaves plenty of adress space for other things.
This could be what is needed to make 3000/4000 move from the storage closet to the desk again.
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I'm worried about the speed. Would much rather see a new 68K/PPC accelerator for the classic with onboard memory sockets.
/Dream
Would also like to see a new Buster Rev with proper DMA without bugs.
/Dream
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I'm worried about the speed. Would much rather see a new 68K/PPC accelerator for the classic with onboard memory sockets.
/Dream
Would also like to see a new Buster Rev with proper DMA without bugs.
/Dream
An accelerator would be nice indeed, but still limited to 128MB by the CPU slot. This RAM board also has the advantage of being much cheaper :)
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"An accelerator would be nice indeed, but still limited to 128MB by the CPU slot. This RAM board also has the advantage of being much cheaper"
Not really, the A2000 accelerators have much more than the 8MB limit of the ZII space. I'm of course just speculating but I've see various posts in the past indicating that more than 128MB would simply work like in the A2000, i.e. only 128MB would be acessible by the ZIII bus, which is more than enough for expansion cards.
Not saying that this cool card doesn't have it's space in the market, judging by the fastlane prices on eBay.
Overall I've found most stuf
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Any ideas on a price??
This thing's got to be cheaper than populating an A3000 with ZIPS! :lol:
If the price ends up reasonable, count me in Amigakit!
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I think it's funny how people often seem to comment about all the additional features they want to see in a product which would surely drive said product from feasible to eternal vaporware. :p
No matter, I think this is an excellent idea. The old FastLane Z3 isn't too slow - it even has a mode in which it supports 40 ns memory. Since the memory on this card is obviously much faster than old 60, 70, or 80 ns 30 pin SIMMs, I'm sure it gets accessed at the fastest speed the Amiga can go, and I'm sure it'll be faster than other Zorro III memory cards. I'll buy one.
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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.
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That kind of price will certainly be nice (and it rhymes, no less ... :D ).
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An Indivision, a Deneb and Zorram is all you need to make an old A3000/A4000 usable again. The only thing lacking is a new combined CPU+RAM+graphics card :)
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Nice to see new hardware for classic!
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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.
But an onboard battery would have elevated the recoverable RAM disk to legendary status. ;-)
So, next project: memory addressable SSD interface? EDIT: Scratch that. Finding SSD devices that fit in the Zorro III address space would be a chore. Just throw a battery on the RAM board and call it done.
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Does anyone still make a ZII version?
With an adapter would it work with an A500, if it were configured to work in ZII mode?
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Does anyone still make a ZII version?
With an adapter would it work with an A500, if it were configured to work in ZII mode?
No, nobody currently makes a ZII RAM board AFAIK.
And judging by the description on the original page, looks like this is strictly going to be a ZIII card. If you want more RAM in your A500, seek out the 4mb trapdoor/Gary solution that pops up on eBay once in a while. AdRAM 540 or something like that...
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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.
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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.
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@ Save2600
There is always hope, lol.
ooh ooh ooh oooh gimme gimme gimme
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@Zac67
I do have an A1200, I guess Elbox still makes memory upgrades for it.
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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
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(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.
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Buy a SSD-Drive ...
ZoRAM is a memory-expansion and not a harddrive-replacement.
I like to see a enhanced 512MB version, anyone else ?!
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Depends on the price but yes, 512 MB would be sweet (what would I use it for though? :) ).
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@Trev
Why don't you just use some readily available & cheap CF card as recoverable 'RAM' disk?
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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:
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Hmm, wikipedia says otherwise, oh well!
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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?
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@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.
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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.
128MB RAM Limit is still there - it means that onboard RAM can't be more than 128MB. This is a Z-III card so is limited by the Zorro III address space (up to a Gig or something, not the CPU limit.
The B2000 only has an 8MB limit on the Z-II space, not the CPU slot. Hence accelerators can have more than 8MB happily.
It should be re-iterated that this card will not be supported by AmigaOS 4 - which is, ironically, exactly where it's most needed.... but it's just not practical. It'd be too slow for the PPC, and it'd require more work on the Classic version of the OS, which they're not updating any more.
For OS 3.9 users, though, it's a God-send... so good work to all concerned!
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Hmm, wikipedia says otherwise, oh well!
Hmm - I look into the Zorro3 specs and it says:
These bits indicate the configuration size of the PIC. This size can be
modified for the Zorro III cards by the size extension bit, which is the new
meaning of bit 5 in register 08.
Bits Unextended Extended
[...]
110 2 megabytes 1 gigabyte
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128MB RAM Limit is still there - it means that onboard RAM can't be more than 128MB.
128 MB is the limit of the CPU fast slot ($0800 0000-$0FFF FFFF). Theoretically, Z3 expansion space could hold up to 1792 MB ($1000 0000-$7FFF FFFF). Onboard RAM is limited to 16 MB by Ramsey, but the architecture allows up to 112 MB ($0100 0000-$07FF FFFF).
(sources: A3000 SM, Zorro III specs 1.10)
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On the german site Michael Boehmer wrote : "Bei einem 5EUR-Riegel von eb*y aus unbekannter taiwanesischer Quelle mit SDRAMs wechselnder Brands ist dem nicht so - und das Risiko, daß damit laufend Probleme und damit Support anfällt, ist für uns nicht tragbar.
Michael"
Roughly translated it sounds a bit like : "With a 5 Euro memory module of Eb*y, from unknown Taiwan source with SDRAMs with different names, it is not that like that - and the risk that thereby constantly problems and thus support results, is not bareble for us."
Please don't shoot me for the translation :)
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Has this board been tested in a Elbox A4000 Mediator Tower bus board?
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Has this board been tested in a Elbox A4000 Mediator Tower bus board?
It says on the AmigaKit site it was tested with Mediator A4000D and A4000Di...so yes, probably will work fine with your Mediator.
I bit the bullet and ordered two ZorRam cards - they should arrive next week, I will post unboxing pix.