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VC 64k expansion?
Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 3:15 am
by fgasking
From my first ever Vic 20, I had this memory expansion pack which sadly failed many years back - but I always kept it boxed away.
It was completely black, but the front part of the case went missing some years ago. On the board it says "VC 64k" by a company (Struggling to remember at work - should have posted from home
)... Mikrocomputer or something like that.
Did I really have a 64k expansion pack and were they that common? I tried to coax the thing into life, but sadly no joy. I plug the thing in which has no effect anymore
Re: VC 64k expansion?
Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 11:21 pm
by eslapion
fgasking wrote:From my first ever Vic 20, I had this memory expansion pack which sadly failed many years back - but I always kept it boxed away.
It was completely black, but the front part of the case went missing some years ago. On the board it says "VC 64k" by a company (Struggling to remember at work - should have posted from home
)... Mikrocomputer or something like that.
Did I really have a 64k expansion pack and were they that common? I tried to coax the thing into life, but sadly no joy. I plug the thing in which has no effect anymore
All the chips on this thing are quite standard/common. I could find the problem or, brute force approach, simply replace all the chips which probably only cost less than 1$ each.
Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 3:34 am
by fgasking
What is the best way to detect faulty chips?... is there a device I could buy? (I'm fairly novice when it comes to electronics)
Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 7:54 am
by 6502dude
I would clean edgecard connector well before replacing any chips.
This would be most likely cause of failing to have any ram show up on boot.
Next, if there are bank selector switches, clean these with a good contact cleaner.
Also, ensure any bank selection switches are in the corrrect position.
I recently looked at an 8K ram expander that somebody had set switches internally so that this 8K ram appeared in BLK 3.
Since it was not in BLK1 on boot, Kernel did not see extra RAM and displayed only 3,583 Bytes Free
Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 10:58 am
by gklinger
6502dude wrote:I recently looked at an 8K ram expander that somebody had set switches internally so that this 8K ram appeared in BLK 3.
Since it was not in BLK1 on boot, Kernel did not see extra RAM and displayed only 3,583 Bytes Free
Thanks for fixing that.