tenbarge@silver.bacs.indiana.edu (01/16/89)
I recently received an apple IIgs with 512k, but would already like more memory Can someone tell me what kind of memory chips I can buy to install in the Ram Expansion Card which came with the cpu? -thanks, Kris Tenbarge
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) (01/16/89)
In article <10500002@silver> tenbarge@silver.bacs.indiana.edu writes: >I recently received an apple IIgs with 512k, but would already like more memory >Can someone tell me what kind of memory chips I can buy to install in the Ram >Expansion Card which came with the cpu? I would recommend planning ahead; presumably you have Apple's RAM card, which is limited to 1M bytes max (beyond the 256K bytes in the motherboard). There is already commercial software that needs all that memory and sometimes more. My experience has been that 2M bytes of expansion RAM is enough for almost all foreseeable purposes, and that 1M bytes is not enough. There are several manufacturers of IIGS expansion memory cards; I'm using MDIdeas OctoRAM, which differs from the others in utilizing SIMMs (such as used by Macintoshes) and is expandable to the IIGS theoretical limit of 8M bytes (using 1M bit SIMMs instead of the 256K SIMMs). You can find other RAM card vendors advertising in magazines such as Nibble. For example, on the inside cover of the latest Nibble, Applied Engineering advertised their GS-RAM products. They also mention something worth knowing about, namely DMA compatibility. Some Apple II peripherals, including I think AST's VisionPlus video digitizer, utilize Direct Memory Access to transfer data. Due to lack of information out of Apple, most of the earlier GS RAM cards did not address the proper locations when DMA was in effect. (BY THE WAY: Does anyone know whether MDI OctoRAM had this problem and how to upgrade if so?) Unless you're sure you will never use a DMA peripheral (and how could you be sure?), you should get a DMA-compatible card. (I think Apple's was OK.) There are also built-in or optional features on many third-party RAM cards, such as battery backup, ROM space, and memory diagnostic software. Some people like to keep programs in RAM disk, and for such users the battery backup option is valuable. I think there was a review of IIGS RAM expansion cards a while back in Nibble or A+, maybe both.