Re: Cirtech GS 8 plusRAM woes...

[amotyka <anthony.motyka@gmail.com>]

On Apr 7, 6:16 am, "ict@ccess" <gids...@sasktel.net> wrote:
> On Apr 5, 10:47 am, amotyka <anthony.mot...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hi guys,
> > I have recently come into posession of a Cirtech GS 8 plusRAM board,
> > having given up on ever receiving the Sirius ram card I ordered a year
> > ago... Cirtech was a British company, which is probably why I can't
> > find much info about it on the net, only photo's, no manuals, and I
> > believe this was the first 8mb board available for the iigs. The
> > trouble is, ever since installing it I have been plagued by random
> > crashes. Replacing the card with my old 4mb AE GS-RAM III makes the
> > system (almost) impossible to crash. I have read old posts about 8mb
> > cards causing trouble with DMA and rom 3 machines, but I'm using a rom
> > 1 and the cards installed are reactive micro's Microdrive (not the
> > turbo version so no DMA), the apple scsi card (not the high-speed
> > version so again no DMA) with cd drive attached, uthernet card (no DMA
> > to my knowledge) and a Transwarp clocked at 16mhz. The card checks out
> > fine with mega memory tester.
>
> > I'm going to run some more tests e.g. with the transwarp at a lower
> > clock and reducing the ram on the board, but would be interested to
> > hear if anyone else has encountered similar problems with 8mb boards,
> > or if anyone can give me some more info on this particular card. I
> > read elsewhere that this card also has a rom disk feature, and in fact
> > has two rows of header pins which I presume would be used to program
> > it.
>
> > Thanks,
>
> > Anthony
>
> I have a Sirius 8 mb card and I was getting quite a few crashes as
> well.  I did the power supply mod in which you change the 18 guage
> wires to 12 guage.  This helped quite a bit and cut my crashes down to
> 1 a day.  I would liked to have done one more mod.  The ground trace
> is supposedly not heavy enough since it goes all the way to the
> opposite side of the board where the RAM slot is.  A ground wire could
> be soldered at the power connector and go to the ground terminal of
> the RAM slot.  I was lazy and ok with 1 crash per day, so I didn't
> test this one out.   But I would recommend trying a larger power
> supply you can get fromwww.reactivemicro.comand also do the ground
> wire to RAM slot mod.
> I use a ZIPGS rated at 12.5 Mhz in slot 3, ramfactor in slot 5 and
> CFFA in slot 7.
>
> Rob

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the feedback. Now you mention it, this card must draw a lot
of power as it uses 8 ram chips per megabyte, so 64 in total, plus the
glue chips. The GS-RAM III by comparison is tiny and has only 4 ram
chips plus a few others. I am using a PC power supply with a
littlejohn adapter but I know the power traces to the slots can be
flakey in rom 1 machines. I will have to try and pluck up the courage
to have a go at my iigs with a soldering iron and see if that helps.
The weird thing is I left mega memory tester running for four
iterations with no errors reported, though i did note during the test
the transwarp was inactive so not contributing to any possible power
issues.
I don't necessarily need the full 8mb, so if I can get it to work with
5 or 6mb instead then I would be happy; I'm just keen to break the 4mb
barrier.

Anthony