Amiga 1200 with PCMCIA Card

[paulisthebest]

Hi i am looking to expand the fastram on my amiga 1200, its currently at 0, and hardly any of the WHDLOAD games work i have installed on its hard drive.

I was given a pcmcia SMART Modular Technologies SM9FCSC4M001 4mb fast flash card, and was wondering if it was possible to prepare this as FASTRAM using the prepcard utilitiy in workbench 3.1?

Prepcard sees it as FLASH ROM 80ns 4194304 bytes, but it wont let me prepare as DISK or Prepare as SYSTEM RAM, it just says Unable to prepare card: Error while writing changes

Is there anything that can be done if not to use it as system ram, but even to use it as storage space?

[fitzsteve]

Hi it cannot be used as fast ram you need SRAM card for that. Or you can use a trapdoor memory expansion which is what I have they go from anything between £20 and £60 depending on who's selling. I paid £45 for my 8mb trapdoor expansion recently.

I am pretty sure you can use it as storage but you need drivers, someone here I am sure wil be able to point you in the right direction of where to download them.

Steve.

[paulisthebest]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

Hi it cannot be used as fast ram you need SRAM card for that. Or you can use a trapdoor memory expansion which is what I have they go from anything between £20 and £60 depending on who's selling. I paid £45 for my 8mb trapdoor expansion recently.

I am pretty sure you can use it as storage but you need drivers, someone here I am sure wil be able to point you in the right direction of where to download them.

Steve.

Did you get yours from ebay? Would like to go that route if i could find a cheap enough one. They seem very expensive on there, and the true SRAM pcmcia cards are ludricious prices! 1mb for £50 plus!

[Photon]

Hm... I already have more simultaneous projects than I can handle, but it would be cool with a little board on a "reversed" pcmcia connector with a 30-pin SIMM slot. It would sit inside on top of the PCMCIA for a nice internal fastram expansion, and could complement an A608 in 5.5MB fast mode and a 1MB chip expansion to reach the elusive maximum of 11.5 MB ram!

If some interface chip is needed, perhaps some dirt cheap Hong Kong pcmcia card of any type could be modified? Now that would be a cool and money-saving mod that would be an "instant fix" for many Amigans \o/

[BrooksterMax]

Yes it needs to be SRAM for PCMCIA and no more than 4mb. I think the "test" is whether or not the card has a battery.

It was cheaper for me like steve, to get a RAM expansion board instead.

The advantage is that you can use a PCMCIA CF adaptor at the same time (well if you have 4mb) to transfer files or even run stuff off it.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by paulisthebest

Did you get yours from ebay? Would like to go that route if i could find a cheap enough one. They seem very expensive on there, and the true SRAM pcmcia cards are ludricious prices! 1mb for £50 plus!

Yeah I got mine from ebay but they come up on here from time to time so keep an eye out. I was checking ebay daily and still feel I paid too much! have seen a few sell cheaper but missed out! Have also seen some sell for £75 whats that about lol...

Also some 8mb boards like mine have a jumper to disable one bank of ram so I can run it as 4mb allowing use of the PCMCIA port. Also some have a simm socket so you can swap out the 8mb module for a 4mb one.

Steve.