cw@madvax.UUCP (Carl Weidling) (07/29/87)
I tried to mail this to Lynn Gold in response to a question about where to get a 4 meg upgrade for a 520 ST and it bounced back. It may be of use to others anyway. I got a memory board for my 520 st from Tech-Specialties. It is a half meg upgrade so my machine is now 1 meg and working fine. I have a pretty old ST by the way, I bought it in the days when the OS came on diskette. Tech-Specialties says in their literature that some old machines might not be able to drive the memory, but mine is OK. The only soldering I had to do was to unsolder some joints for a cover to the CPU board (something you only have to do on old machines according to their literature). My options were to order a bare board and acquire memory chips to stuff it with myself,or I could have ordered the board with 2 megabytes, boosting my machine to 2.5 megabytes, or with 4 megabytes, in which case I would have had to disable the memory already on the machine, to quote their instructions: "cut or desolder one side of choke L29 (in the lower right-hand corner)." So, for 4 meg you do have to munge slightly the electronics of the board. I did have to bend back some tabs on a metal cover used as an RF sheild, and I had to cut away part of a plastic stiffener of one of the posts of the upper part of the plastic case to make room for the board, also, the instructions mentioned taking precautions against static discharge damage to the chips. As a matter of fact, they say that NOT using an anti-static work pad and arm band while installing will void their warranty. They mention RADIO SCHACK cat. #276-2399 approx $1.99 as an anti-static armband that you can wear, and they acknowledge that just opening up the 520 voids Atari's warranty (which expired a long time ago for my machine anyway). You can also get them to install the board for you, but I was able to do mine myself and I'm pretty much of a klutz around hardware (a friend of mine who is a mechanical engineer was standing by while I did it, he cut the plastic stiffener). I've seen ads for upgrades that are slightly cheaper, but this system was designed to allow one to wait till the 1 megabit RAMs become cheaper, and then replace the memory chips in the board. You can contact these guys at: Tech Specialties Co 909 Hodgkins, Suite A Houston, Texas 77032 #(713)590-3738 The prices I was quoted were $129 for bare board, $179 for one with 512K (what I actually got, with incidental costs it added up to $192), $895 for the board with full 4 meg installed. They also have clock modules and hard disk systems in case you are interested. Regards, Carl Weidling