New ZorRAM Image

[amigakit]

Production of the new ZorRAM memory expansion is complete and they are being quality tested this week.

Here is the final production photo:

http://www.amigakit.com/images/zorram.jpg

[amigakit]

Some initial tests of the initial ZorRAM we have received from production.

I am testing 4x ZorRAMs in an A4000 Rev B (desktop) with a Commodore standard Zorro daughter card and Commodore A3640 Rev 3.1 and Buster 11.  Apologies for the bad picture :-)  Testing goes on...

[amigakit]

:-D It was exciting to see such a huge amount of Fast memory on a humble A4000!

I will add a caveat to this.  When I replaced the A3640 with a WarpEngine 040, I could only use a maximum of 3x ZorRAM cards (maybe Kickstart limitation?)

[amigakit]

@ Piru
Which speed test program would you like me to try?

@Domi73
Yes ZorRAM is for all Zorro III Amigas including A3000, A3000T, A4000, A4000T

[amigakit]

Dont worry- from projects we have currently on the drawing board I think the next lot of cash investment goes to new hardware for the A1200..

[amigakit]

I don't expect any Classic Amiga user to utilise a full 1GB of FastRAM- the example test was just a bit of fun :-)

However, I often use up to 256MB Fast memory on my own A1200 especially when I am using Pagestream, TVPaint, PDF, Ghostscript, and FXScan applications.

A4000 accelerators with memory on-board are very scarce (and expensive on Ebay unfortunately).   Hopefully, ZorRAM will give standard A4000 users a well-priced and readily-available way of adding memory with modern SDRAM technology and warranty/support.  

It designed to be the most cost effective way of adding memory to the A4000 so it need not be constrained to standard 16MB on board memory.

If it has the added benefit that larger, more memory expansive programs are developed for the Classic Amiga, then we will be very happy.

I estimate that access times of Zorro memory would be around the approximate 10Mb/sec rates- but I have not yet run the memspeed test yet.  When I am back in the office on Monday/Tuesday I will run speedtests and post back the exact results.

[amigakit]

Sure, the memory chips are very fast, they will not even break into a sweat when the Amiga is accessing it ;-)

[amigakit]

The initial tests I did were without any onboard memory except 2MB chip mem.

[amigakit]

@Piru

On our test machine today, Bustest produced results around 9.2 - 11.4 if I remember correctly, thats with 4x ZorRAM 256MB installed (1024MB) :-)

I can certainly try it with a Morphos 1.4.5 installation, but does MorphOS support Zorro cards?  I thought it didnt.

[amigakit]

Will AddMem tool work with MorphOS if it doesnt auto allocate the memory?  Or does classic MorphOS have an equivalent command?

[amigakit]

We have also today tried 4x ZorRAM 256MB installed together with a 4060T accelerator (68060) with 128MB SIMM memory- here is the results:

http://www.amigakit.com/images/4xzorram-4060t.jpg