FPM/EDO RAM sticks

[Gilthanaz]

Hi all,

after a long time i finally went through my 80 square meters hardware stock and did a rough check on what i have and what not (also throwing out several cubic meters of trash... i already miss the Apple 7200).

Long story short, now i have about 200+ memory modules, ranging from 2MB to 128MB (With the majority being 4 and 8MB). A rather random test of about 20 of these put in my A1200 showed that so far, all of them were "accepted" - so the machine did boot and showed extra memory.

As iam still a newbie with Amiga Hardware, i did not manage to get my A1200 to recognize more than 4MB of RAM, no matter how big the ram stick itself was.

I came to the conclusion that this might be because:
* I have no clue what turbo board iam using. There are jumpers. Yay!
* I guess the jumpers can also set a maximum memory size, because AFAIK too much RAM causes the PCMCIA port to be become unaddressed/inoperable

Now i have several questions:
* Does anyone need extra RAM?
* In case that the above is true, i'd need a hint as of where to get a program for native amiga environment to do an in-depth memory test (like memtest86) so i can be sure the RAMs actually work and dont have nibble-seizures
* Are there affordable A1200 Turbo boards that (1) support more than one memory stick and (2) can address more RAM and (3) have at least some documentation so i dont have to play the "happy jumpering"-game

Oh, also .. someone warned me when i first posted here that starting to collect/work with Amigas will escalate. Yes. It does.

Greetings,
- G

[Lord Aga]

Jumpers jumpers
I had to play quite a bit with my fast RAM card to enable it to see 8 megs. Just try all the combinations. My trial and error run went something like 4, 4, 4, 2, 4, 0!, 4, 2, 4, 4, 8 yaaay

[motrucker]

Hi all,



I came to the conclusion that this might be because:
* I have no clue what turbo board iam using. There are jumpers. Yay!
* I guess the jumpers can also set a maximum memory size, because AFAIK too much RAM causes the PCMCIA port to be become unaddressed/inoperable

Now i have several questions:
* Does anyone need extra RAM?
* In case that the above is true, i'd need a hint as of where to get a program for native amiga environment to do an in-depth memory test (like memtest86) so i can be sure the RAMs actually work and dont have nibble-seizures
* Are there affordable A1200 Turbo boards that (1) support more than one memory stick and (2) can address more RAM and (3) have at least some documentation so i dont have to play the "happy jumpering"-game

Oh, also .. someone warned me when i first posted here that starting to collect/work with Amigas will escalate. Yes. It does.

Greetings,
- G

What card are you using? There are two sites that are easy to get to and list many jumper settings. One is:  http://amiga.resource.cx/index.html#topics
or the other is :  http://www.amiga-resistance.info/bboahfaq/index.php?sid=376351&lang=de&

There are other places, but these will get 90% of the cards.

[odin]

You might strike lucky and one of the jumpers is an unlabeled free sex and beer jumper or an 8MB ChipMem jumper .

If you hold both mouse buttons while booting you should enter the early startup-menu where you can enter the expansion diagnostic. Here you can note the manufacturer and card code (and see if it works ) with which we can try to find out which card you have.

[Gilthanaz]

Thanks, i knew about the boot menu but did not think about using that four digit code to find out what board i have (and its so obvious! D'oh!)

I'll check that when i have time to play with my amiga hardware next time, probably tomorrow or on the weekend

Thanks again,
- G

[Gilthanaz]

Hello again!

I report full success. I managed to find out what board it is (Mtec 68030/28 'Viper') and found a manual for the jumper configuration. Unfortunately, the board only supports up to 8MB. But hey, thats a 100% compared to the former status!

@motrucker:
Thank you for the links! Unfortunately, the first one (which the search by manufacturer ID) appearently does not know of my board; I'd have the option to fill in the data there for the next poor guy who'll look for it, but i'am afraid i might put in some wrong technical data on the details... Should i enter the card into the database anyway, what do you think?

@all:
I still need help finding a tool to check the RAM on the Amiga, as i've mentioned before i thought that maybe something like memtest86 exists that i could start from workbench and would do a full read/write and maybe even timing test on the SIMM/DIMMs i stick in. Anyone got a hint for me? That'd be terrific

Also, can anyone probably suggest an affordable expansion port that has at least an 68030 and FPU on it, and supports (way) more RAM (like, 32 or even 64MB) on maybe two available memory slots?

Thanks all for the help!

- G