A500: Supra Ram 1MB + A501 expansion

[OscarBraindeaD]

Hi all,
I've an A500 with 512KB of chip ram and a Supra Ram expansion (in the Amiga's left side) with 1MB. I'm updating it (bought a HxC Slim to play games from it) and, in order to code something in Blitz2 or Amos, I've thinking buy a A501 expansion to get 2MB of ram (0,5 chip and 1,5 fast). Anybody knows if is possible have the supra ram 1Mb and the a501 expansion working together?
Any conflicts could happen?

Thanks in advance.
Regards.

Oscar

[attle]

Should work. Actually the A501 won't be fast ram, it will be slow ram (or "ranger" ram). If you'd rather have 1MB chip ram you can make a simple modification to the motherboard that changes how the A501 is mapped.

The Supra will be fast ram so it shouldn't conflict with the A501 either way.

[Zetr0]

@OscarBraindeaD

Hello there, I think I can certainly help you with your project.

Firstly I would suggest buying one of the following

A500 / 68k DIP 8mb FAST RAM adaptor
$49 CAD (Aprx €37.00 Euros) + Postage

(stock image, thanks to Kipper2k, 68kDIP (A500) memory adaptor left, 68PLCC (A600) right)



Modifying your A500 for 1MB CHIP

With that you can slightly modify your A500 motherboard - very easy if you have a common Revision 6 A500 -

Overview



JP2 Location



JP7A Location



Those modifications will asset the trapdoor ram as 1 contiguous block of 1MB of CHIP RAM. with the addition of a K508 8MB FAST Adaptor - you will have quite a pokey system. I would say that you wouldn't need (or be able to use) Supra RAM with that set up, so sell it on or find a deserving soul / computer

You could then look for a very cheap mass-storage (Hard drive) based side car - since you have the fast RAM you wont need to look for one that has that as well - hence cheaper.

One option (mainly because its crazy awesome) is to get an A570 with SCSI adaptor - that way you can have a side card Optical CD Drive and an External 8GB SCSI HDD!!!

Its what I have but on an A500+ (well once I get / build the A570 SCSI Adaptor)

[Zetr0]

Alternatively

a fellow AmiBayer Tomthul offeres a very clever trap door upgrade that has a portion of memory with a batter backup - this allows one to create a setup RAM disk that loads on boot.

Tom has this loading up with the use of his 4MB RAM / IDE adaptor - allowing for internal IDE hard disk / mass storage.


(stock photo, image thanks to Tom Thull)


(stock photo, image thanks to Tom Thull)

Another option is an external product that plugs into side expansion bus granting IDE -


(stock photo, image thanks to Tom Thull)

This with this adapter one could have 4MB FAST RAM - 1MB CHIP + RAM DISK + IDE

I have a version here that asserts the FAST RAM and then loads the IDE driver from floppy disk. Once thats done you then have access to all the yummyness that is WHDLoad games and the such like!


Also a great little development platform for Blitz / Amos and C / C++ =)


There, that should give you some ideas =)

[OscarBraindeaD]

I'm impressed with you knowledge and all the options out there.
I'm specially interested on Tomthul´s device. I'll seek for it.
In the worst case, now I know, I can use my old supra ram and a a501 expansion.

Really thanks, guys.