Yo!

Nice phone

Slick.

It's a lot bigger than I thought it would be.

Yea Man! Those mini CD-R's are really cool, but so hard to get hold of

Uh? How big did you think it'd be???

Was she also surprised that it was bigger than she expected?

So, did you install it yet ? ? ?

What are we talking about now?

Patrick's new memory expansion boards.

Sorry I should have put a smiley after my post - my bad attempt at humour was too subtle Fixing now.

I'm guessing it doesn't need to be said, but just in case: That board looks great! I can't wait to preorder one!!

No... I don't think she was, but that really was of no concern to me.

That reminds me of a mountain bike ride I was on once with a friend, and her ex-boyfriend. There's a hobby farm in the middle of Toronto that has some cattle, and as we rode past, ex-boyfriend looked over at one of the animals, which happened to have its back-end facing us. Turned out to be a bull. I hear this low "woah" type sound, so I ask him what's up. He says "I wish I had a pair like that." I just looked at him, shook my head, and said "no you don't -- they'd just get in the way." He looked so crestfallen after he gave it a bit more thought.

Any comments on performance?

Ok maybe I am just slow.... but where is the order page for the memory boards?

There isn't one. Look over here...

Not yet: in spite of getting the first one, I may be the last to fit it. There is an issue with the boot loader on the Mk2 which has to be sorted out first. With Hugo about to get married and disappear for a while, this ain't gonna be any time soon....

Would you mind going into the Mk2 boot bootloader issue a bit? Does this mean that the Mk2 won't be able to use the additional memory?

When you install the expansion board, the Mk2 original memory needs to be removed from the main board to stop capacitive loading of the memory bus.

The boot loader for the 2 (this is according to my memory of what Hugo said in a pub when we were all a bit well cut) expects a different size memory block than that of the expansion board (the 2A has a modified bootloader which expects the correct size). It will then fail to boot as it has initialised the memory map incorrectly.

The correction is:

- add a jumper to the mainboard to remove write protect from the protected bootloader address range
- blow a new bootloader with the correct memory map
- remove the jumper

The problem with this is that Hugo will have to write a new bootloader. He's getting married this w/e. Forget it for now...

It should just be the identical bootloader as used on the Mk2a..

Patrick was kind enough to send me a bare-board memory card. Well, actually not completely bare, just lacking the RAM chips themselves (since I have a small supply of those already courtesy of Paul).

It will be a while before I rerig my toaster oven to solder on the RAM chips, but right now I just have to say: this looks MUCH simpler to attach to the empeg than I'd expected. The through-hole solder points are extra large, perhaps double the diameter of a "normal" pin-size through-hole. This makes it very easy to get the soldering iron tip into the opening to ensure good flow/connection.

I think these boards will work out just fine for anyone who installs them.

Cheers

They use the same RAM chips? I am a bit surprised - I thought higher capacity chips were involved.

Can we stack RAM chips on the expansion boards so Paul and I can get like 256 MB?

No. Stacking relies on having spare bank select lines available. The expansion board uses them all.

Heh.. I think the capacitive loading of that many chips would not give reliable operation, but it should be possible to stack them one extra layer high. But some support logic (an invertor) would be needed to wire up the extra necessary address line to use them.

EDIT: From the processor's point of view, each DRAM bank can have up to 128MB of memory, so a maxed-out empeg could (in theory) have 512MB of DRAM.

Cheers

You'll need to add a carbon fiber hood to the bottom of your empeg to make space for that hot-rod 512meg stacked ram.

(and let me just warn you now, do NOT search for "carbon fiber hood" on Google Images while at work. no wonder I don't let myself post to the BBS from my office.)

??

The worst thing I see, even with safe searching turned off, is a girl in a swimsuit lying on a car's hood. Hardly scandalous.

Maybe his employer finds the Honda Civic offensive.