Macintosh Classic Onboard RAM upgrade?! Eh?

Interesting notion, with the memory upgrade card that would give you 10MB, the 1MB more than the backlit Luggable, so what have you got to lose?

A Classic MoBo is about as close to a recycling center as any Compact Mac board belongs! [}] ]'>

lol actually it would be 4 megs soldered onboard and then 4 megs in the ram card. 8 total.

I guess you are right

if it worked that would be pretty cool huh?

Yep, but you'll undoubtedly need to jumper address, CAS, RAS lines etc. to the RAM card (if not the freakin' MoBo RAM) if they even exist, that sucker barely has enough pins to do SCSI!

Check the DevNote for the possibilites, what memory controller ASIC is on that turd anyway? :?:

Ram card is only 3 megs not for a total of 7 not eight even if it works.

would be cool tho as there should have been no reason it could not match the same memory cap as the luggable.

whoops! yeah your right macdrone! thanks!

The address map for the Classic puts ROM at the 4mb mark, so it's kinda stuck to 4mb. All the 68000 macs use this address arrangement, with the exception of the Portable. The Portable is the odd one here, where it maps ROM at the 9mb mark.

In the 68000 machines you can't really rearrange addresses since there's no MMU. You can't remap the hardware registers, so things are kind of stuck.

. . . or the PowerBook 100's 8MB?

Interesting that they bumped the Lit Up Luggable to 9MB, if that was due to higher density memory in that same SRAM package. This seems to be the case with the MoBo DRAM upgrades that work.

As I understand it, uni's soldering four on the floor and soldering anther four on the door which already has slots for another two 1MB SIMMs. That would be a 10MB maximum loadout by my count.

The Classic shipped the same day as the LC, which does 10MB on a 68020 w/o a PMMU . . . hrmmm . . .

. . . I wonder if there is any chance that the two share that same broke-@$$ Memory Controller kluge? :?:

just tossing this out there…

is there a way we could get the rom from the portable and burn it onto a rom and pop it into the classic?

i have some portable roms i can send you

yeah what trash said… 4 on the mb… and 4 on the card

hard core!

Wikipedia says that you have to change the memory map along with that for it to work...

now I'm sorry, I don't really know exactly how all that works, but does a certain chip 'respond' to a certain address? Or is that set in the ROM?

Just because the Classic, LC, and IIsi were released together doesn't mean they share any architectural similarities.

The IIsi uses the MDU memory controller found in the Iici.

The Classic uses the BBU memory controller (well, calling it a memory controller is a stretch, it acks some bus accesses and moves physical ram around so the machine can boot out of ROM) found in the SE.

The LC was the first with the new memory controller also used in the LCII.

The physical locations of hardware are also their logical locations in machines without an MMU. Hardware lives at physical addresses, those don't change. An MMU, the processor can present a logical view that differs from the Physical view. Without an MMU, the two are necessarily the same. The memory controller in all macs going back to the 128k do some amount of moving the address space around, for example although ROM physically lives at 0x400000, the memory controller makes it available at 0x0 on boot so the processor can boot from it, then moves the bottom of RAM to address 0x0. The II and the LC memory controllers do a little bit more to allow the 24bit/32bit views of the world.

The Classic has SCSI at 0x580000, SCC registers at 0x900000, IWM and VIA above that. They don't live at the same locations as on a Portable.

The LC, supporting 32bit accesses, has things arranged more along the lines of the Mac II and subsequent 32bit capable machines. The hardware lives in the 0xF00000 range in 24bit mode.

Yup, that was the question. I just wondered where the Classic fit into the grand scheme of things architecturally. :-/

Later on, more machines shared hardware with the development of more and more expensive ASICs.

so basically … to take it back a couple steps… if i upgrade the ram from 1mb to 4 mb… then i will have 4megs and will not have to use the memory card?

or do you think by installing different ram it might screw the whole thing up?

It's probably fine to upgrade the soldered ram and not have to use the expansion card. But going above 4mb seems tough.

Unless you map the expansion RAM to an unused section of the address map. Again requiring serious modifications in software, firmware, and hardware. LOL

ok so here is what i have

- desoldered the 1meg onboard - 8 chips

- soldered the 4megs of ram, - 8 chips

[attachment=0]Screen Shot 2013-12-31 at 9.40.24 AM.png[/attachment]

- Poped the board back in the classic w/o RAM card installed

! AND she boots!

[attachment=1]Screen Shot 2013-12-31 at 9.27.33 AM.png[/attachment]

Nice!

However only 2 megs of ram show up.

out of the 4.

So ok, i pop the 3 meg ram card back in…

Flip the classic on…

And she boots!

now it says there is 4 megs of ram installed.

ok…

( must be ignoring the one meg soldered on the ram card )

so for giggles i remove the 2 one meg simms.

and change the jumper to simms not installed.

to force it to use the one meg onboard.

and no dice it will not boot.

so here is what i am thinking.

The VLSI POS gives me 2 banks… A and B… but will only allow a maximum of 2 megs per bank.

lol so what do i do… leave the 4megs on there… and just pull the ram card… and sell the ram card to someone in need and maybe just

stick with 2 megs of ram… or… solder the one meg back on and just stick with the ram card, and 4 megs of ram.

well considering the macintosh classic is slow as molasses on a cold winter day… i might just keep that 4 in there…

for a total of 2 meg's and free up this 3mb ram card for a sale…

not ideal but should work… never know what you are going to get with these sob's until you start swapping chips…

next, soon will be classic II experimentation. hoping to bump up the onboard ram to 8megs… i wonder what mysteries that memory controller will show me.

had to put the one meg back on… i started getting address errors and random bombs in my testing… oh well.

no effort is ever wasted

Remember the classic is just a modernized Macintosh SE.

Actually, considering the excised PDS and the switch from a convenient DIP 68000, to a POS SMT 68000, it's just about as close to a totally hamstrung Macintosh SE as Apple could possibly have managed.

It makes a friggin' Mac Plus seem easily expandable.

you got a point there jt

Yah! The SE was a top flight Compact Mac when it was introduced alongside the Macintosh II. Apple couldn't possibly have let any of that expansion slot goodness or, heaven forbid, even let Killy Klip compatibility sneak its nefarious way into a brand new new design for a Low End Mac priced under $1,000 for heavens sake!

Upgradeable RAM . . . oh my goodness! What were we thinking? :lol:

Did You Try soldering the 4 Mb on the Ram card instead ?

no unfortunately i don't see a point to that

I think he's windering that, since it can address 3MB of RAM, it may have enough control lines to handle all four. I'm curious about that as well, I still don't see much point either, but it would be interesting to see what would happen

No I don't think it addresses 3 Meg's of ram .

the card is not a SIMM , it's unique. The one meg soldered on the card meshes with the one on the mainboard.

To make bank A. The Simms are on bank B by them selves.

2 Meg's max per bank.