I can't remember exactly what it said, I was driving off and saw my empeg write some sort of "Party" message on bootup - anyone know what that is about???

Des.

Amersfoort!!! Nice one, Mark!!!

Mark has been known to embed messages for special dates in the player. When it starts on one of those key dates, it will display a nice message. In this case, the Fifth Annual Amersfoort Meet being held this weekend.

/me rushes off to grab the latest hijack....

* It's Party Time, Folks! *

That is what's displayed.
Cruel reminder that I am missing all the fun.

I suspected that was coming when I saw it in the kernel sources!

I didn't know it before I read this thread, but somehow I knew it

Anyone checked again since midnight GMT?

Wow... Strangely quiet on the board this weekend... I wonder why... So, any reports from Amersfoort???

Must be too much fun going on over there. No time to keep us updated... And no webcam this year of the BBQ...

you don't have to. According to Mark the messages have been in there for 6 months or so :-)

No broadband this year :-( I'm at home in Germany at the mo, but I way off back over there in an hour. The meet has been great!

And that alpha!

I could tell you what is in it, but evidently Rob Voisy doesn't even know yet! And sorry guys, we're not allowed to distribute it this year either :-(

I can tell you however that they have found a use for the microphone input! and extra memory. Patrick has also had a cunning idea how we can squeeze even more memory in ... without stacking any chips!

Oh, and this year there were THREE releases at the meet!

Yup - and I agree. He does rock - I am doing my best to organise getting there for next year (yes, trying to sort it a year in advance is the only way)

Okay, let's see - I have the weekend of the 2nd booked for my sailing, not sure when my practice conference is...can we have the next meet mid July??

Now I expect everyone to have collected the full set by now.. one per day (if it all worked as programmed way back about 6 months or so..)

More memory did you speak?
I just killed a whole day trying to stack those 4 levels of chips to get a measly 64 MB. 128 or higher would be way better. Do you have any details on how to accomplish the feat without any stacking or daughter boards? Different kind of chips maybe?

Patrick is/will be investigating the possibility of making a memory module (SIMM?) adaptor, that with a thin bit of PCB would attach to the test points at the backside of the main board. (PCB, short piece of wire, module holder)
Main doubt he had was about the chance of finding room for the holder/module somewhere.

Would these SIMMs be the same SIMMs that would have been used in Pentium 1 PCs, of which my department rcently scrapped a load that some how all went out the door with out RAM?
So I'm a packrat, and this does sound intresting.

My memory is lousy on this stuff (memory versions/sockets), and I didn't write it down, but "memory module, 64M, still very available dirt cheap" points to something like that...

Still, Patrick came up with the idea on the spot during the discussion and hasn't yet (well, who knows by now ) looked at the nitty gritty -- just so we don't jump overboard...
Chip stacking is proven to work and even 32M is probably all one's likely to need. Hmmm, where'd I hear something similar..?..

One big thing about this lovely idea was that it'd be an easier (soldering wise) route than the chip stacking.

Me, I could put all my music on one drive, leaving a goodly amount of space.

Quote:
Main doubt he had was about the chance of finding room for the holder/module somewhere.

Still, Patrick came up with the idea on the spot during the discussion and hasn't yet (well, who knows by now ) looked at the nitty gritty

We watched Patrick sit in the bar for a couple of hours last night, busy designing the upgrade module on his laptop (while entertaining us with his usual ramblings of course).

When he first discussed it on the Saturday he was talking about an existing SIMM (or was it DIMM) plugged into a module soldered where the current memory chips are.

By the time he had finished last night he instead had a board design that would sit under the mainboard, with memory chips soldered directly to the new module. The circuit board design was titled "Empeg Mk2 128MB upgrade board"...

He wasn't sure if there was going to be enough room for it. He said he was planning to work on it some more over the next couple of weeks.

Initially I had a similar idea of using some sort of daughter board,
desolder original memory chips and solder thin flex wires to the mounting points of the chips. The problem with that setup was that I needed a lot of through holes on the daughter board since I cannot make routing lines between the 0.8mm pitch of the chip legs (at least not in my home-brewed prototyping lab), so I gave in to the stacking solution.

You see, I'm not really satisfied with the memory size until my hard drives spin only once per each play list (e.g. an album).

Besides, the SA1100 chip does not have math co-processor, so that makes it slower than say Pentium 200 Mhz.

He's on design number 2 now, and routed it this morning - it does tend to mean rather a lot more memory than he originally thought....

Ahhh...

Well, the more the merrier I guess

Will it coexist with existing upgrades?

No. ALL the existing memory chips will be removed and the area will have to be cleaned so the new bits can bit fitted. Don't envy Rob on that task

Lordy, what a MACHINE that guy is. Without looking, I wonder if a DIMM slot could be mounted on the sidewall of the board. Or, on the bottom of the back of the drive tray. But heck, if he can make it fit on the underside, than rock on.