Lets build a 8MB Fast Ram Expansion for the Amiga 500

[@rabbaga5t]

This channel is turning out to be an excellent DIY guide for us Amiga enthusiasts! Keep up the great work!

[@CRG]

Thanks for saying so, I've lots more Amiga stuff planned although next month is all about the DOS machines for DOScember.

[@MrFixiit]

i think you did a great job on the soldering.

[@CRG]

Thanks

[@siberx4]

Great work on the soldering. Two points: 1. I think you did things in the right order; access to the pins on your fine pitch surface-mount ICs is more important than access to the much larger terminals of your passives, so I always populate the ICs first and then the passives around them. Reversing this makes "drag" soldering along the chips difficult if there are any small components nearby already in place. 2. My usual strategy for hand-soldering two terminal surface mount passives is to pre-tin a blob of solder on only ONE of the two pads. You can then hold the component with your tweezers and slide it in from the other side while heating the tinned pad with your iron, and reposition/adjust as needed. Once the first terminal is soldered in, it's easy to go back and solder the second one, and then subsequently touch up the first one if needed.

[@CRG]

Since recording this I've actually built the other board and I must say you are correct. I thought I'd try the small components first and actually found that when flowing the likes of the ram, the heat would dislodge the passives just beside it. I ended up having to use a lot of hot air to reorient the components that moved. I have done soldering as you suggest by tinning one pad first, in fact that's the way I would do surface mounted electrolytic caps. Any time I try to do it with these really small components though they always end up tomb stoning on me, i.e. standing on their end. Maybe I'll give it another go.

[@siberx4]

@@CRG As long as you're holding them cleanly with the tweezers and slide the part in across the untinned pad (and remove the iron before the tweezers to give it some time for the solder to solidify) then I don't usually have problems with tombstoning when using this method.

[@garethwhite4123]

Hi. I used to solder prototype surface mount boards as part of my job, and A tip I can give you is. Maybe try a solder paste and one with the flux in it. Clean the board, Put lines of the paste on the board across the rows of contacts. Then place the component onto the paste it should hold it place for you. Then tin your soldering iron, clean it and then touch the end pins (closest to the corners). Once happy the component is in the right place, run your iron down the component above the lines of paste. Best of luck, hope you find this useful.

[@reddragon27284]

Kickstart 1.3 had a utility to use fast ram first if I remember correctly. Think that was fixed in kickstart 2.04. There’s a mod you can do to make that slow RAM become chip ram which is more useful. Think it depends on if your Angus supports it though.

[@reddragon27284]

@counterair173 yeah that’s the one!

[@GadgetUK164]

Excellent job =D Good idea with the socket, but the pins are a bit short that way =/ I prefer to go with the separate key switch pins there. Great project by LIV2 - love this board!

[@CRG]

The pins are a bit shorter but they still make good connection in the socket. The red board is thinner than the black one. I've built that board too but used the separate pins. Trying it under a socket and it just leaves too little of the pin showing. It is a great board, fantastic work by LIV2.

[@TomaszWiszkowski]

Great job putting this together! One hint about the slow ram in sysinfo: the fast memory had a priority of 0, same as slow memory. This should be something (much) higher, otherwise system will be unable to tell the difference and load programs and libraries "wherever". This is hopefully easy to fix in FPGA, just reach out to Liv2 and let them know!

[@CRG]

LIV2 is aware of it but once I get the slow ram modded as additional chip that will solve the issue.

[@TomaszWiszkowski]

@@CRG ah - of course. I saw that you discovered this out on the video. It's just that with a priority set correctly it won't matter if there's anything in your expansion slot, eg. You might be able to add chip ram via expansion slot without risking all your system stuff landing there - pretty sure you know what I'm after 😁. Great video. Great channel. Brings a lot of memories 😍

[@peddersoldchap]

@@CRG Hi. Great video. Tomas, thanks for the insight about RAM prioritisation. CRG, do you know if this issue has been solved by Liv2?

[@8BitRetroJournal]

You made that look easy. Nice job on using the thru-hole in place of the surface-mount. Someone did that on my Amiga 600 motherboard with one of the caps and it looks pretty solid on there.

[@jamesrizzo295]

Just found your channel. Great video. Always wanted to learn to solder, you made that look easy. You've inspired me to just give it a go. Great room setup by the way too. Big Amiga fan myself having just last week finally getting myself an A1200. Liked and subscribed!

[@stog33]

Well done, the satisfaction of getting something you've built yourself working is hard to beat, I've yet to tackle smd tho

[@CRG]

It is a great feeling, especially when it works first time. I used to get nervous at the thought of smd soldering but my confidence is growing, the boards I have coming for the A1200 will be a big test though. If you want to get started with smd just get decent flux and solder, good tweezers are a must for the little resistors and caps. Just take your time and you'll be fine. As I said if I can do it, anyone can.

[@50shadesofbeige88]

Thanks for sharing the issues that you run into while doing your projects. It's valuable information!

[@Rattadazong]

Cool! Things we dreamed of in the 80s...

[@CRG]

Absolutely, 8mb of ram back then would have been almost unheard off.

[@bubblehead78]

True. I paid $700USD for my first Amiga 500 hard drive... 105 MB!... and thought that was fantastic! lol.

[@wskinnyodden]

You MUST convert that SLOW RAM to CHIP RAM, trust me when I say this is what you need, specially because it will basically give your Denise and Paula more RAM to work with directly.

[@CRG]

Yep that modification is on the list, I just need to find a compatible Agnus.

[@kalensus]

Great video! It's nice to see someone on KZbin who is a not an expert in soldering and has genuine worries like the rest of us. I still can't get my head around how you do those small legs on the chips though. It seems to defy the laws of physics that you don't get the solder touching several pins at once.

[@CRG]

Thanks, I'm absolutely not an expert but if I can do it, well, anyone can. The magic comes from the flux, you really need the best stuff you can get and stuff designed for smd soldering. Chipquik is expensive but well worth it. When I built the rgb2hdmi I was using cheaper stuff and I had a lot of pins bridged. With chipquik, so long as you don't have to much solder on the iron, it just flows were it needs to. I'm sure there are other good brands of flux out there too.

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

if only these were around in the day... enough ram to run a few rebootable ramdrives with plenty to spare.... the issue you had with slow ram being used first you may want to run 'fastmemfirst' which resides in the system folder on a standard 1.3 workbench or run it in your s/startup-sequence will fix it for you - another option is to go for 1MB chip with an 8372A, but with that much ram I would mount several RAD:'s and diskcopy whatever disks you wanted into them and reboot and enjoy high speed loading at fast ram speed

[@RacerX-]

Awesome job! That is a neat kit. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to checking out your other videos.

[@CRG]

Thanks

[@bubblehead78]

Nice job! You did as good a job on U5 as possible under given the conditions. Subscribed.

[@CRG]

Thanks

[@wimwiddershins]

I built a couple PiStorm boards recently, my first go at SMD. Had a few hiccups but got both running. SMDs are not toooo bad, at least the parts you can see the legs of.

[@CRG]

Nice work building the PiStorms. I need to get mine upgraded again, want to try Emu86.

[@akkudakkupl]

4:06 Never too much flux ;-)

[@MegamanEXEv2]

You absolutely made that look easy, great job!

[@CRG]

Thanks for saying so. I've got the ide board lined up to do next, hopefully within the next week or so, I'm just waiting on a few parts to arrive.

[@DarenPage]

I remember shelling out £100 on a 512kb RAM expansion for my old A500, think it's still floating about somewhere. Dread to think what something like this would have cost back in the day.

[@CRG]

Well at that price I can tell you 8mb would have been outside of my budget 😂

[@DarenPage]

@@CRG tbh I don't even think that sort of RAM size was heard of back then. XD

[@danyoutube7491]

@@DarenPage At the start of the 90s you could get 8MB for an A500, but it was typically part of a hard disk sidecar unit. In any case, I think the prices for such an upgrade would have been comfortably more than the A500 itself!

[@karolwojtyla3047]

Please make some movie with complete programming instruction for this CPLD. Thanks! :)

[@Boris_Amiga1200]

Nice job! Amazing!

[@garyhart6421]

Well Done ! I could never have done that.

[@CRG]

If you had asked me a few months back I'd have said I couldn't do it either. Trust me if I can l, anyone can.

[@SteveWiFi]

Great video! I know you've probably been asked a ton of times, but what soldering iron and solder extractor do you use? Mine is awful and I ruined an Ikea Air Quality device yesterday because my shakey hands was waiting for the iron to meld the solder into the wires.

[@CRG]

The soldering station is a cheap thing from Amazon, it's not actually made anyone but there are multiple others, they typically cost about £100. If you're struggling to get heat into things it could be a couple of problems. The tip on your iron might be too small for what you're doing or it may even just be dirty. What also helps it's applying some fresh solder to whatever you're trying to melt. The solder extractor that you see me and most other KZbin folk using is by duratool. You can get it for about £90.

[@8bitbubsy]

Now it would be cool if you could make the 512kB fake-fast be a 512kB chipmem upgrade instead. Maybe this is possible by messing with the solder-jumpers? I think I recall doing this at some point.

[@CRG]

Yes I can do that and it is the plan for this machine but I need a different Agnus. The revision I have only supports 512k of chip.

[@user-wj9xq7ig2v]

What's with the scratch on the agnus? I'm just messing with you I know you were bothered by it in the other video. Not a big deal when you get that 8372 in there. Nice guide this is something I'll do with my A2000.

[@esseferio]

I guess the cup of coffee is the most important tool :)

[@CRG]

Absolutely critical 😂

[@Spongman]

really the design should be changed to use a sot23-5 LDO regulator. that package type is significantly more poplar and would have had a much easier time finding a drop-in replacement from any other manufacturer.

[@daw7563]

As I recall it you can use the slow ram as extra chip ram by soldering some wires. However it may break compatibility in some software, so back in the days I had a switch to swap ram configuration when needed.

[@CRG]

Yes and that is the plan but I need a different Agnus first. Mine only supports the 512k chip.

[@neozeed8139]

The Ian Malcom “must go faster edition”?

[@PJBonoVox]

Nice work bud. That's the most animated I've ever seen you :) Do you have a bunch of crap electronics hanging about? If so you'd think you should be able to pillage some of those regulators from one of them.

[@CRG]

Good idea, I'll have a look and see if anything has them. I was rather excited that the board worked. I've since built the other one and it's up and running too.

[@PJBonoVox]

@@CRG Yeah I could tell. You almost broke character 🤣

[@dmitriivanov7143]

Very nice! Couple of questions: - What was the "official" way of adding Fast RAM to A500 back in the days? My limited understanding is that trap-door expansion adds Slow RAM. - Where is the Dread demo on A500 with this RAM expansion? :)

[@CRG]

Back in the day we added fast ram to the side car expansions. Dread runs great on the 500 with or without this expansion 😉

[@DavidMarvin]

I know this is probably in some office, but it feels like it is in the back of a truck.

[@CRG]

It's actually in an old garage that I converted. Would be cool if it was in a truck, I could take it on the board 🤣

[@DavidMarvin]

After the first couple videos I actually looked at the background and I was like, woah. I could have sworn the first two episodes was in the back of a mobile computer repair truck. The scrap board idea is really good. I grew up taking broken boards, not knowing what I was doing, and fixing whatever looked broken. If it didn't work I would look at it for longer and find something else that looked broke.

[@arminth]

I would have AMS1117 3.3V available. But these are SOT-223! If this would be of any help, let me know.

[@giuseppelavecchia775]

Lavoro eccellente

[@jamessm4401]

The amiga mini is coming out soon. Any interest in that device?

[@ingodiekmann8321]

Thanks for this awesome video. Great job. What kind of flux are you using?

[@CRG]

For this sort of work I use chipquik flux. Its expensive stuff but I'd call it almost a necessity, it just makes like so much easier.

[@JVHShack]

The only thing that I'm left wondering about is if my chip ram and slow ram are dead, would my A500 even come to life if I had the gottagofastram installed?

[@CRG]

No, you at least would need the chip ram.

[@tahustvedt]

TF536 is a great accelerator to build.

[@peddersoldchap]

I vote for this too!

[@LaserFur]

I use kapton to cover all the threw holes till I am done with the surface mount since it is hard to get the threw holes clean.

[@CRG]

That's a really good idea, when building the second board one of the holes got blocked by accident, I was able to clear it out just with the wick but still a bit of kaapton take to start with would save the hassle.

[@rafotat5798]

Do you know if this is compatible with a570 cd-rom ? Nice Video

[@db_37205]

Always drink the coffee first, then put on your loupes (I use Amazon)

[@CRG]

I could use a pair of those, maybe Santa will bring me some 😆

[@francoisleveille409]

Just to make it VERY complicated they won't give you proper SVF files. The repository contains JED files that you must use with their cheap and cryptic programmer. Fortunately, there is iMPACT to the rescue and can convert these to proper files you can use on a decent programmer.

[@catgirlQueer]

I'm wondering how does sysinfo figure out how much RAM there is?

[@rasz]

Amiga has apis for that. System one that keeps info about Free Memory Pools, and hardware one for talking to expansion cards on the bus called Auto-Config.

[@gilbertvera1678]

Would the gotta go fast work woth the open source 14 mhz accelerator you build as well?

[@CRG]

No they don't work together because of where that accelerator maps it's ram too, it clashes with this card.

[@gilbertvera1678]

@@CRG well f that stinks. Guess that means it will be useless with what I am thinking or hoping for.

[@gilbertvera1678]

@@CRG what if I just have it set for accelerator mode only would that allow the gotta go fast to work with it ?

[@CRG]

@@gilbertvera1678 it might work like that but I'm not sure to be honest. I think there is a newer version of the 14mhz board now with more ram on it. Might be worth having a look for something like that?

[@gilbertvera1678]

@@CRG well reason I am asking is because I ordered the ram. But for the accelerator I only ever set it up as just a accelerator only. Figured with the accelerator only I can keep the trapdoor ram and it would be fine.

[@davepauljones]

Hi where to get the kit from

[@CRG]

The board I got from a friend but you can download the Gerber's and use one of the PCB houses to provide them. The parts I bought from mouser. Just follow the bill of materials in the GitHub. Calling it a kit isn't really correct, poor choice of words on my part.

[@MichaelEhling]

26:13 Oooh, terrible ideas! Tell us more. 🙂

[@CRG]

You'll have have to wait and see, all I can say is that it might be something for the 1200.

[@Fred_le_lorrain]

So what are you doing with 8mb of ram with this machine? What software use this expansion of ram? Thx.

[@CRG]

Very good question and if I'm honest I'd struggle to name any software I'll be running that needs it. More ram is always good to have though and if I add IDE to this machine and have it booting to workbench, well, the additional ram will help offset that.

[@alm434]

Are you ready for building TF536?

[@CRG]

The terrible projects I have lined up are for the 1200.

[@alm434]

@@CRG TF1260? ;)

[@CRG]

Maybe 😉

[@stephenwhite506]

Where do you get the 68k socket, thanks?

[@CRG]

Fairly sure it was mouser I bought them from but you can get them from any of the typical electrical component houses. They aren't the cheapest thing though.

[@KonuralpBalcik]

u not install pi 4 HDMI ????

[@CRG]

The pi to hdmi works fine, I just disconnected it for ease of access to the CPU position.

[@wishusknight3009]

It is no wonder Amiga's are getting so expensive. People keep hording them by the dozen.

[@CRG]

I've only got 6, half a dozen ;)

[@ArmpitoftheGiant]

"Terrible" ideas?😉 LOL... But more seriously, you should just mod that A500 so that the Slow RAM becomes Chip RAM.

[@CRG]

Terrible pun 🤣 I do plan on modding this system for 1MB chip, I need a later revision Agnus though. This one only supports the 512k.

[@ArmpitoftheGiant]

@@CRG Sadly, another chip for the Amiga that's gotten harder and more expensive to find...

[@daspec]

Can I ask you or the people in the comments WHY almost every single Amiga upgrade is crippled like this? As far as I know there's no limit to 4 or 8MB for the A500 in terms of RAM addressing. Yet you and many others making choose DIY to add only 4 or 8MB of ram instead of using 16 or even 64MB. The same annoying problem is with the TerribleFire 534 that only has 4MB of RAM instead of 16 or 64 like the 536. These RAM chips are the same DRAM used in old graphics cards and they are still produced. So what is the problem of soldering a 16MB chip? The price difference is very small. I am considering to desolder the RAM from the TF534 and replace it with 4X16 MB chips, and avoid using this RAM addon that you are making completely. I found it online in many stores and then found your video of making it from the GIT schematics. But it would be more elegant to use less extra hardware like a sandwich inside the Amiga if we can avoid it.

[@CRG]

This expansion is using 16 bit fast ram for which the address space is limited to a maximum of 8mb. Moving to 32 bit memory associated with many of the 32 bit processor accelerators allows the use of up to 128mb.

[@mikegravgaard340]

Just a follow from Glenn's comment; the issue with the 68000 and this expansion is it uses all of the Zorro 2 address space (I.e all 8MB). Not such a issue on an A500 but on an A2000 it effects memory used by Zorro 2 cards.

[@dkhl02]

Una calculadora de bolsillo tiene más capacidad jajaja 🤣😂

[@TheSocialGamer]

The only thing I'd recommend is moving the mic away from your nose. When you're close up, all I hear is you're stuffy nose just whistling away. 😭

[@CRG]

Really? I can only apologise. I have had a bit of a cold so sorry for the sniffles.

[@bubblehead78]

@@CRG I did not hear any distracting noises.