GS RAM quirk

["Joel" <joelbuckley54.nospam.@hotmail.com>]

I had a Orange Micro RamPak 4 GS (4MB).
But it doesn't support DMA, so it really slowed down my HSSCSI card.

I picked up an AE GS RAM Ultra on ebay (only had 256k, but room for 4M)
No disk, no docs.

Plugged it in and seemed screwy.

Said I had over a Meg in the control panel.

If I put the 2 RAM chips in the far end, it would say I have 5 Meg.

Evidently, the GS does a pretty lame RAM check on powerup.

It counts down from high memory. If it finds any, it assumes there is memory
all the rest of the way down.
Even if there's only memory from 4.75M to 5M address space.

I suspected that the board was configured to work with a 1M ROM3
motherboard.
I have a 256K ROM1 motherboard.
So it was leaving the space from 256K to 1M empty.

After I made my first post, I was checking some old docs I got with an AE GS
RAM (not the Ultra).
And it included info on the GSRAM Ultra. I thought I was going to be out of
luck, because I knew the GS RAM and GS RAM Plus needed a PAL swap to change
the configuration.
But luckily, the GSRAM Ultra only needed a cut trace jumpered.

It uses the same 44256 RAMs (not easy to find and not that cheap) as the the
RamPak, so I'm in business.