kellym@shark.UUCP (Kelly McArthur) (06/11/86)
> > One of the things that most people are probably very interested in at > the moment would be memory expansion boards for their Amiga. I for one > am, and would love to hear from anyone out there who has seen any, exactly > what do you think about it? How much is it? > Also, would someone out there from Commodore comment on the > "accepted" standard for memory expansion if there is one... > The latest issue of Amigaworld has ads for a number of RAM expansion devices. While I know nothing whatsoever about some of them, I did have a chance to look at some beta-release samples of CardCo's one meg expansion add-on, the "aMEGA" board. CardCo Inc. is a Wichita, Kansas manufacturer of Commodore peripherals, mostly C64 stuff. Their aMEGA card is a stand-alone, one megabyte RAM expansion card that draws its power from the Amiga, and is housed in its own metal box. The Amiga's 86-pin expansion connector is passed through the card, allowing the user to stack on additional expansion bus peripherals or aMEGA cards. I understand that future expansion boxes will also carry the 86-pin expansion port, so that people who get aMEGA cards will not be "stranded", and will still be able to use them in conjunction with plug-in memory cards, etc. The aMEGA comes with a disk that contains programs that will add the memory to the system as "fast" RAM. These programs are intended to be put in the s/startup-sequence file of version 1.1 workbench disks. Version 1.2 kickstart takes care of this automatically, and the aMEGA configures and is added to system memory during the boot. As an Amiga developer myself, I can say that the aMEGA follows the expansion and auto-config guidelines that were established by Commodore-Amiga. While this is not intended to be a critical review of the product, I will say that I had two aMEGA cards running simultaneously on my machine with no problems. They both auto-configured on power up from either the supplied software, or a standard 1.2 kickstart disk (beta release). Most of the software I ran on the machine was smart enough to take good advantage of the extra memory. To me (strictly a hardware hack), having the extra RAM was neat, but I can see where it would be a virtual wet-dream for programmer types. And the bottom line? Well, this is STRICTLY SPECULATION, but I think the board will *retail* for something in the neighborhood of $550. They have begun shipping, and so units should start showing up at dealers outlets very soon. Hope this Helps, Kelly McArthur {declabs...ihnp4...hplabs}!tektronix!shark!kellym ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Disclaimer of sorts: I am acting as an official spokesman for no one in particular.