Re: Looking for pics of IIGS hardware expansion cards

[Wayne Stewart <waynes@intergate.bc.ca>]

Justin Scott wrote:

> Can those cards go up to 16 mb?  I know where I can get some Sirius cards, I'd
> just never seen a picture of them, and the description on the site never
> mentioned SIMM slots. :)

Technically the 65816 can use 16mb of RAM but the IIgs is made such that it can
only use 8mb as RAM so nobody produced cards over 8mb. A 16mb card could
have been made but the last 8mb would be seen as ROM,  AE made the RAMkeeper,
a card that you could connect two RAM cards to so you could with the right
combination of cards get up to 8mb RAM & 8mb ROM. A transformer and battery
could be hooked up to it to allow fast booting. I've never tried comparing it's
boot
time to a Ramfast which does DMA. Main reason is the card had a bad reputation
for
occasionally starting fires when used with the transformer or battery backup. The
two I
know about were earlier versions but I don't know whether that problem was fixed
or not.
Without the power supply & battery it was fine though. Usually once you got a
hard
drive ROMdisks lost a lot of their appeal

    Wayne