Re: RAM Expansion for IIe

["David Chiu" <none@nowhere.org>]

"Simon Biber" <simon@basilisk2.cjb.net> wrote in message
news:XQTg6.8778$o85.48172@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> Our local junk store had three IIes for $2 each, one had a mouse card, one
> had a RAM card, so I picked up those two. I've put those two cards into my
> good IIe, and I've been playing around with the RAM card.

> It has 256k on the card, with a quarter of the sockets filled. Does this
> mean I can fill the rest and get 1024k? Are the chips required easy to
find?

The cards of that era typially uses 256x1s (41256 or some variant thereof.)
It was a fairly popular parts, but in this day and age may take some
looking. You may want to look for old ISA VGA cards that may use those type
of memory parts.

> I put it in Slot 7 and I'm not sure if this is a normal place to put it.
> When the computer starts it says UNABLE TO START UP FROM MEMORY CARD. This
> made me think, can I boot from the RAM card? So I copied the PRODOS and
> BASIC.SYSTEM files to it and rebooted. A cold boot obviously wipes the
> contents, but a warm boot still resulted in the same message.

> Then I tried formatting the card. After formatting, it worked! Boots
Prodos
> fine! I suppose formatting from the system utilities enabled the boot code
> on the ramdisk? It makes me wonder why they couldn't make it automatically
> have the boot code on there.

The card is probably trying to boot as RAM disk (which on a cold boot does
not contain any valid binary image.) The typical place to park one of those
is slot 5 I believe. You should be able to copy PRODOS.SYS and your
preferred boot program on to it to boot off it.

> Does anyone know how I can get it to retain the contents while the
> computer's off? Can I hook up a little battery to keep the refresh going
> like the BIOS settings / clock battery in a PC?

There used to be a product call RAM Keeper produce by AE that would work
with their memory boards, that would allow AE's RAM cards to retain their
content after power down. But given the nature of the beast, it wasn't
terribly popular then, and is certainly harder to find now.