andrew@alberta.UUCP (Andrew Folkins) (12/31/86)
Well, a couple of weeks ago I asked for opinions on the various memory expansions available for the Amiga. Here is a summary of all the messages email'ed to me, as well as relevant articles posted over about the last year. Some of the postings mention products that should be out by now, are they? Thanks to all who replyed. ============================================================================= [ First, pre-request Usenet postings] >From: perry@picuxa.UUCP (Perry S. Kivolowitz) Subject: Alegra Review (REPOSTING) Message-ID: <142@picuxa.UUCP> THIS IS A SECOND POSTING - I was told that the message has been truncated by some sites. So, there IS a line eater after all! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- I received the Alegra 512K board from Access Associates. What follows is an unsolicited unpaid review. (1) Physical Characteristics - Packaging The Alegra board is contained in an attractive well designed all metal enclosure. Visible surfaces are painted in a quiet brown paint with a pebbled matte finish to obscure finger prints. The enclosure, again, is quite intelligently designed. It comes apart with a single screw yet is extremely sturdy. (2) Physical Characteristics - P.C. Board The Alegra p.c. board shows competent design and good thinking. No wires or jumpers (booboo's) were found on the board. Every component has a by-pass capacitor for noise reduction. The p.c. board is a solid, good quality, four layer board. It contains a socketing configuration which will accept either 256K or 1Mbit ram parts. The ram chips themselves are manufactured by NEC who, my sources tell me, enjoy a superlative quality assurance record. Solder leads were trimmed (all except one row anyway). While this does not really affect board function it is usually indicative of competent manufacturing. The Alegra does not pass the bus. Access Associates has told me that the 512K board uses less than one amp. They say that the 2Mbyte board (replace 256K parts with 1Mbit parts) uses less current than the 512K board because 1Mbit parts will be CMOS. If I have this right, timing on the board will be radically dif- ferent for the 2MByte board. (3) Documentation The board came with a single sheet of installation procedures. This included physical installation as well as startup-sequence changes needed by 1.1 of the operating system. The instructions were succinct and completely adequate. (4) Software The Alegra comes with AddMem for 1.1 users. Also, a program called Ident which pokes the configuration space and activates the board. No software is needed by 1.2 as the Alegra is fully configures itself during system start up. (5) Performance Running my memory speed assesment program (posted earlier) I got the following statistics under 1.2 with a 68010 processor. No other tasks were running, the CLI window occupied the entire screen. FAST RAM CHIP RAM DIFFERENCE Code In FAST RAM: 28800242 28900280 100038 Code In CHIP RAM: 29266934 29250309 -16625 Thus, I assume that no wait states are being incurred. (6) Summary And Suggestions If you are looking for a closed end RAM expansion board the Alegra is a good value embodying solid design. However if you contemplate future additional expansion the Alegra will not (then) be useful. Performance is good on the 512K board. I don't know if the 2MByte board will be the same (better or worse, I don't know, however I suspect that performance will not be as good). All in all, I was impressed by the solidity of the design and construction and again, would suggest the board for new Amiga owners who do not expect to require any additional hardware expansion capability. Yours, Perry S. Kivolowitz >From: richr@pogo.UUCP (Rich Rodgers) Subject: Re: Amiga Hardware Wishlist Message-ID: <2640@pogo.UUCP> The following are descriptions of products that my company has designed for C Ltd. (Was CardCo). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An expansion box that sits on top of the Amiga approximately 4 inches high. It does not cover *any* of the ports except the expansion bus, which it graciously passes forward in the same manner as the aMEGA board. It contains 6 slots, 5 of which are accessible to the Amiga DMA. It has it's own voltage sensing power supply (thus no power switch). The box was designed with ergonomics in mind and should be a real winner. There are no "Extras" with this box. What you get is a card cage and a power supply. This was done to minimize costs, and give the shopper the opportunity to spend as little as need be to get <JUST> the features that <HE> needs. Name: aMEGA Box Price: $499 Available: August (Read LATE August) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A 1 to 2 megabyte memory plug in card for any Amiga expansion box that follows the Amiga Hardware Specifications. This memory card runs at no wait states, and should satisfy even the most discriminating memory critic. Name: aMEGA Board II Price: $299 bare board $499 1 megabyte (user expandable to 2 meg) $699 2 megabyte Available: August ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A 20 megabyte DMA Hard Disk. This was OEMed from a company much larger than we are. I have seen this disk in action and it is **FAST**. Name: ? Price: $799 Available: August ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >... Now for the feature whose unavailability >astounds me: > >6) SCSInterface!! This brings me to our final product. A multi-function card that will have at least the following items: SCSInterface (Optional DMA Chip) Battery Backed-up Clock 2 Serial ports (One 25 pin DIN, the other a 9 pin AppleTalk Hardware compatible DIN connecter) It may also have a parallel port... Price: $499 (Although I think this is preliminary and will go down.) Available: September (Read October or November) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Even though I do not do the actual manufacturing of these products I do get royalties and this may be deemed as a commercial oriented posting. I regret if anybody has taken offense from this particular posting, but I feel the information is of general interest to the net and posted it in spite of my reservations. The products listed are all working (even if in prototype form) and should be available as soon as C Ltd. get its' manufacturing to the level of supporting a thriving Amiga market. I hope that this information has been of some help. Richard N. Rodgers, President Creative Microsystems Inc. 9140 SW Locust Street Tigard, OR 97223 -- Rich Rodgers >From: farmer@ico.UUCP Subject: Re: Want info on MicroBotics ram/drives Message-ID: <18100004@ico> About Microbotics: I called, and got a real friendly, reasonable person who seemed to know his stuff. He told me the 20M drive was $1495.00, and was as fast, or faster than anything else out there. That price doesn't seem too bad to me. Also, it passes the parallel port out, and has another port for anything else that uses SCSI. He told me that their memory board with 512K memory, and sockets for another 512K was $495.00 and that a piggy back board with just sockets for 1 or 2 MEG was $99.95 (Thought he said it was a 2MEG board, but then he said it would give you a total of 2MEG aditional?) They also have a separate board with a clock, and circitry to do parity checking on their ram board with an aditional 256k chip per bank of ram. Didn't get the price on that one. He claimed that the board had no wait states, and passed the buss. I too would love to hear a review of this product. By the way, it was Commodore who gave me their phone number. David Farmer >From: daveb@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Berezowski) Subject: fast ram timings (Comspec) Message-ID: <704@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> I ran Perry's memtest program on my AX2000 (2 meg ram board) from Comspec Communications in Toronto, Ont. Here's the results: CHIP 28,883,648 FAST 29,283,660 DIFF 400,012 or 1.38% I guess that means that the expansion ram is 1.38% slower? Not bad I guess. BTW the AX2000 is encased in a steel (amiga white) case, complete with little rubber feet and passes the bus through. I'm currently using it with my MicroForge 20M hard drive under 1.2 with no problems. Boy it sure is nice to have ~2,500,000 free!!! Regards, David Berezowski >From: mwm@opal.berkeley.edu (Mike Meyer) Subject: Memory speed report, RS Data Systems Pow-R-Card Message-ID: <1289@jade.BERKELEY.EDU> This was run on an Amiga 1000 w/ 68010 cpu and the RS Data Systems 2 Meg Pow-R-Card on a MicroForge single-slot expansion. The only things in memory were the Workbench and the CLI the memory test program was run from. This version of the memory test was compiled under Lattice, with the while loop containing the asm code replaced by a call to memcpy(). This should produce slightly slower code than the Manx version, but shouldn't invalidate the test, as the question of interest is the time to access memory. The test was run several times under slightly different conditions. The value below is as described above, and seems typical. CHIP: 156451473 FAST: 150751446 Difference: -5700027 Or a net gain of 3.6 percent in the fast memory. Not bad - the fast memory is fast! Now, someone who understands the hardware better can tell me why the test is invalid, and what I need to do to make it valid :-). The Pow-R-Card is in strange shape, mostly because the rest of the world didn't behave as RS Data Systems expected to. Rather than try and explain what's going on, I'll tell you how things have happened, as reconstructed from my talks with RS Data Systems. In January or February, RS Data decides the Amiga is going to be a hot machine (pretty sharp people, right?) and starts asking who is going to be building expansion boxes for it based on the then-current expansion specs. They find five companies who claim to be working on such, and so start on their memory card. They get their card ready in June/July, only to discover that four of the five people they talk to don't have expansion boxes. The only things available are from MicroForge. Therefore, they start on their own expansion box. In early August, I call them to ask about the board. See the end of the article for a description of it. They tell me the above, state that they are shipping the board and the MicroForge single-slot expansion board. The 2 Meg Pow-R-Card is $850 or so, the MicroForge card is $84. Their expansion box will be available in 2 months for $84. I decide that $15 or so a week for 2 Meg is reasonable, and order a Pow-R-Card and MicroForge expansion, planning on getting their expansion box later. Shipping time is roughly 2 weeks (have to get the card from MicroForge). At this time, fate intervenes, and I wind up out of town for 2 weeks starting about when the card should arrive, followed by a one-week vacation, so I don't get to look at the cards for a while. When they arrive, I find that it doesn't autoconfig with 1.2. They say "yes, that's they way the old specs are." I'm told that everybody who had the Pow-R-Card and MicroForge expansion would be getting one of their expansion boxes gratis, sometime around the end of September. In early October, when 1.2 is officially released by CBM, I'll be able to buy a board for $15 or so that goes in the second slot in their expansion box and makes their memory card autoconfig. After a weeks use, I decide that the board seems somewhat flakey. Call RS Data up, and complain. They send me a floppy with a ram test program for their card. The floppy arrives DOA, so I call them again, and download a copy of the software. At the same time, they give me a cute little program that opens a one-gadget window, and will upon request allocate or free all available fast memory (not sure what it does if more fast memory becomes free after it thinks it's got it all. Haven't tried it). Sure enough, the memory test program finds a RAM chip that fails intermittently. It even draws a picture showing where all the chips are, with the bad one in red. Pull the chip, check that the pins aren't corroded, re-insert the chip. Everything works like a charm, and the board has been rock-solid ever since. Call them back to tell them this, and they let me know that the expansion boxes are running right on schedule (meaning about a week earlier than they had told me. No dummies, these guys - they give themselves time to fix things!) so I should be seeing mine in a week or so. I expect it any day now. Now, a description of the board: It's a one-slot 100-pin board. You get either 2, 4, 6 or 8 meg. The 2 and 4 meg versions will run off of Amiga internal power. The 6 and 8 meg versions need to be in an expansion box with its own power. The memory is zero wait-state, "unless you access it while it's refreshing that bank. But if you're actually using it, that should never happen." I'm not a hardware hacker, but the board appears solid enough to me. All chips are socketed so that you RS Data can do chip-swapping with you should some go bad. The 6 and 8 meg boards use a daughter board. I have not seen this. Upgrading requires new PALs from RS Data. They are willing to talk about selling those without memory. I'm going to investigate that later. As stated above, it does NOT autoconfig. Available later, for a slight extra fee. This also eats up a slot in your expansion box. The expansion box has been described to me. It passes the bus, and does the same for the mouse port. Whether it passes the second mouse port is unknown. Just so long as I can stack the second disk drive on it, this doesn't bother me [Listen up CBM - the only ergonomically bad thing I've found about the Amiga is that there IS NOT a good place to put the second drive. It HAS to be on the right side of the box, where it interferes with the mouse cable]. I'll post commentary on that when I get the box. I'm happy with it. I wish it autoconfiged, but can live without it. The RamCheck is great, and lets anyone do chip-swapping for bad memory chips. MemGrab is something that's nearly trivial, and something like it should come with every memory expansion, at least until everyone starts writing code that works with fast memory. I haven't decided whether to buy the autoconfig card when it shows up, or put the hack in startup-sequence and use the slot for something else (SCSI controller for an IOmega box, maybe?). RS Data can be reached at: RS Data Systems 7322 Southwest Freeway, Suite 660 Houston, Texas 77074 713/988-5441 Naturally, I have no affiliation from them except as a satisfied customer. <mike [ What follows is Usenet postings in reply to my query - A.F.] >From: perry@well.UUCP (Perry S. Kivolowitz) Subject: Re: RAM expansion info wanted Message-ID: <2200@well.UUCP> In the referenced article, mention was made to ASDG's pricing for Amiga memory expansion. This information is outdated. Also, here's some additional information: .5M $370 (unsocketted) .5MS $445 (socketted) This is a 2M (see below) with only .5Mbytes installed. Upgradeable by user to 2Mbytes. 1M (noone ever buys this) 2M $750 2MS $800 This is a 2Mbyte Zorro expansion board with 0 wait states and full autoconfig. It makes a great ram expansion for TurboAmiga's. All ram products: o come with the RRD(tm). This is the ASDG Recoverable Ram Disk which allows up to an 8Mbyte fully AmigaDOS compatible ram disk to be recovered (instantly) upon rebooting after crash, reset, reboot, or guru. o come with 1 year warranty and full set of diagnostics. Quantity pricing to user groups (etc): At five "units" (units defined as any combination of 2M's or .5M's): 2M from 750 to 700 .5MS from 445 to 400 At ten "units": 2M from 700 to 675 .5MS from 400 to 370 Special Pricing for people who purchase before February 1st: if you bought 1 2M, get second 2M for $499. if you bought 1 .5M or .5MS get 2M for $549. Rack products: Mini-Rack-B DOES NOT EXIST! Rather, it did exist at one time but was disappointing to us, so we trashed the design and went with: Mini-Rack-D $325 Two slot FULL Zorro. With power internally (for *both* slots - some people!). Does not pass the bus (but...see further down). Measures 6''w 10''h 10''d. Does not obscure mouse or joystick ports. Very fine quality metal construction. Has cabeling ports in rear. Mini-Rack-C $195 Two slot Zorro SUBSET. Same metal work as MRD. Does *not* have +12V or -5V available to expansion bus. Great for interim expansion or for people who want memory only. But... Both racks can be bought back at full purchase price by ASDG when our four slot (top mounting) rack becomes available. In essence, if you want a four slot box (with internal disk mounting etc) we'll loan you a 2 slot now (with your MRC or D purchase price acting as a deposit on the four slotter). New Product Announcement: 8MX A single 8Megabyte Full Zorro memory board to be available around March to April of 87. This board will run with 2, 4, or 8Mbytes installed. Also, to the best of our knowledge, noone else can make the following statement: It will also run with 6Mbytes. (There is no generic autoconfig support for a 6Mbyte board on the Amiga). We provided this extra logic so that people with 2M's can get a full 8Mbytes without pain or hassel. Yes, we have plans for a disk controller. Unlike any available today. Hope this clears things up. Perry >From: hamilton@uiucuxc.cso.uiuc.edu Subject: Re: RAM expansion info wanted Message-ID: <172200015@uiucuxc> i've had the C Ltd ram for a few months, and i've been very happy with it. don't believe the $550 price; i got mine for $430, and $450 is common. if i were looking to get ram now, however, i would probably get one of the small chassis units like the ASDG or Pacific Cypress. >The Alegra board is upgradable to 2 Meg by replacing the RAMs with 1 Mbit >DRAMs (as these "become widely available"). Are they, and if so, how much >do they cost and where can you find them? Micros Unlimited and IC Express are advertising 100ns 1Mb's for $40/ea; that's about 10x the price of 256K's, for 4x the memory, or 2.5x premium for reduced real estate/power requirements. wayne hamilton >From: ee162faq@sdcc7.ucsd.EDU (John Schultz) Subject: Re: RAM expansion info wanted Message-ID: <842@sdcc7.ucsd.EDU> For Alegra owners (or future): In the San Diego area, 1 M drams are only $29 ea.(120 ns). You will also need a new PAL chip, about $15. Almost everyone in our development group has one. Works great, and we will probably purchase the extra memory and PALs at once for a major discount... John 7OHN >From: kim@amdahl.UUCP (Kim DeVaughn) Subject: Re: RAM expansion info wanted Message-ID: <4622@amdahl.UUCP> > I'm aware of ASDG's recoverable ram disk capability, do any of the > other boards have this? Can I buy the software for this separately? An outfit called "Side-Effects, Inc." (in Raleigh, NC) has advertised in a couple of AmigaWorlds and in Amazing Computing. Their ad claims they have a memory card called "Side-Store" that is 2 Meg/card with no wait states. Comes with "RAM-disk that survives resets/reboots". ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ They're also advertising Side-ARM ... a 6/12 slot backplane that passes the bus; Side-Track ... an ST-506 compatible Hard Disk controller (with built-in clock); Side-Band ... a MIDI interface; and Side-Port ... a serial, parallel, and SCSI interface. All products are said to provide full Zorro compatibility, auto-config, 6-month warrenty, etc. No prices are given. Anybody had anything to do with these products? Are they vaporware or available? /kim >From: eric@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Eric Lavitsky) Subject: Re: RAM expansion info wanted Message-ID: <1536@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> The ASDG .5M board is upgradeable to 2Mbytes. - if you buy the board socketed, it is a painless job, otherwise you will need to solder chips and bypass caps (or sockets and caps) into the motherboard. No extra PAL is necessary for the upgrade - our boards use standard 256K x 1 DRAMs, 150ns access time or better (but faster chips won't do anything more for you). Eric [ And finally we have the Emailed responses.] From: alberta!vax135!cjp (Charles Poirier) My Alegra .5M board works fine. I paid about $310. Cleared upon warm boot. 0 (I think) wait states. Haven't looked into the 2M upgrade; this capability was significant to my decision to get Alegra, but for now I have enough memory. The hard disk I want isn't being made yet so I have no complaint yet about lack of a pass-thru. Charles Poirier From: alberta!ihnp4!lll-lcc!ptsfa!pttesac!vanam I have C Ltd's aMEGA board (1M). I've had it for about 3 or 4 months now. It was one of an early batch which had a jumper wrong which caused the memory to take wait states, slowing it down to running 17% slower than CHIP mem. I did a fix as per a magazine and now it runs only 4% slower than CHIP mem, so there are a few wait states. I have never had any trouble with it, and for the $495 that I paid for it I am quite satisfied. Marnix From: alberta!eris.berkeley.edu!ucbvax!mwm (Mike (Don't have strength to leave) Meyer) I've got the RS card. It died about three months after I got it. They repaired it for free, but UPS lost it. I asked them not to ship UPS, in writing. *SIGH*. They were willing to give me testing software for the asking when it started failing, though. Just called them up and downloaded it. The board does not upgrade to 4 Meg, it upgrades to 8. But you need a seperate power supply. The second 4 Meg goes on a daughter board. They are working on software to let it survive reboots. I'm happy with it, considering that it was one of the first one the market. Since I'm going to want to go to 8 Meg eventually, this is probably still the only one I'd buy. <mike From: alberta!ihnp4!ttmcsa!dwd I am especially interested in the Techni Soft expansion because they are the lowest price. I called them up and they said the price was actually $600 instead of $500. They claim it has no wait states and that it passes the bus. For $600 you get a 4-slot chassis, power supply, and 2M of RAM. The extra slots are not standard Amiga expansions, they are only for their 2M expansion boards which cost $380 (not $300 as reported in Amiga World). I am getting a brochure from them. I am very interested in finding out if anybody has bought it and tried it out. - Dave Dykstra, AT&T-Skokie (Teletype)