martyl@bucket.UUCP (Marty Lee) (12/10/87)
One of the guys at work bought an Apple SE with 1 Meg of RAM (4 256K SIMMs) Wanting more performance he also purchased a Hyperchager 68020 upgrade board with 1 Meg of RAM installed. With the release of HyperCard and Multifinder he quickly found out that 2 MEG of RAM was not enough. So he ran down to the local APPLE dealer and had two (2) 256K SIMMs removed and replaced with two (2) 1Meg SIMMs. His total RAM in the SE box is 3.5M. After firing up multifinder he finds that only 2.5Meg of RAM is available, NOT 3.5Meg of RAM! The Hypercharger user manual says 3.5Meg should be available. The Hypercharger technical installation manual says 2.5Meg should be available! Its all because of the 68020 and its need to have 32 bit words. Mac II owners run into the same problem. We should have caught it before it got too far as we were going through the same growing pains with the Mac II. SE owners with a 68020 upgrade card beware! Check with the manufacture for complete technical details before you spend your hard earned money. You may end up paying for 2Meg of RAM and only be able to use 1Meg of it.
kwallich@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (Ken Wallich) (12/11/87)
>The Hypercharger user manual says 3.5Meg should be available. >The Hypercharger technical installation manual says 2.5Meg should be available! >Its all because of the 68020 and its need to have 32 bit words. >Mac II owners run into the same problem. ---------- Why should I (a MacII owner) have problems because Hypercharger doesn't let you access all your memory? We have a MacII with 8 meg here at work, and seem to be able to use 8 meg. My macII at home has 1 meg and I can use 1 Meg. I may not be catching something in your explaination of the problem, but it all seems quite fishy to me. I am interested in your growing pains with your MacII, could you elaborate? I am sure the MacII owners out there would like to avoid any potential pitfalls we are unaware of... BTW: Isn't a SE + a Hypercharger + extra memory about the same price as a MacII with a color monitor? Just wondered why people went that route (aside from the "the SE is quite portable, the II isn't" argument, I can QUITE understand that one). -------------------- Ken Wallich *My views are mine, and mine alone* Consultant "Slimey? Mud Hole? my HOME this is!" DCI kwallich@hpsmtc1.HP.COM @Hewlett Packard ...hplabs!hpsmtc1!kwallich "Why am I soft in the middle, when the rest of my life is so hard? - P.Simon"
stew@endor.harvard.edu (Stew Rubenstein) (12/13/87)
In article <11540084@hpsmtc1.HP.COM> kwallich@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (Ken Wallich) writes: >>The Hypercharger user manual says 3.5Meg should be available. >>The Hypercharger technical installation manual says 2.5Meg should be available! > >>Its all because of the 68020 and its need to have 32 bit words. >>Mac II owners run into the same problem. >---------- >Why should I (a MacII owner) have problems because Hypercharger doesn't >let you access all your memory? Mac II owners do have the same problem, only worse - if you buy only two SIMMs and plug them into two of the four empty slots, it won't work. With the HyperCharger, it will work, but because of the way memory is divided between the motherboard and the Hypercharger board, it can't map all of it. You have to buy four 1Mb SIMMs and plug them into the Hypercharger board to get 4 Mb of fast 32 bit memory. Note that you can order the board with no memory so you can populate it yourself without throwing away 1Mb of 256K chips. You still get only four, not five, Mb, cause the ROM is mapped in the second four Mb of address space. In this configuration, it's actually FASTER than a Mac II because there is only one wait state, compared to two for the Mac II. On the other hand, you can't plug a 68851 MMU into a hypercharger. >BTW: >Isn't a SE + a Hypercharger + extra memory about the same price as a >MacII with a color monitor? The SE+H020 is cheaper, particularly if you can get one under the GCC developer discount program. I don't think it's worth it unless you already have the SE, though, cause you're gonna someday want color, and a Mac O/S with decent memory management will require the MMU. Stew Rubenstein Cambridge Scientific Computing, Inc. UUCPnet: seismo!harvard!rubenstein CompuServe: 76525,421 Internet: rubenstein@harvard.harvard.edu MCIMail: CSC