Skip to main content
Home Forums 68kMLA Fabbing 30 pin SIMMs — #19
Post #19 by Gorgonops
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryTroubleshooting
Post DateFri, 12 Oct 2012 - 17:55
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/fabbing-30-pin-simms.26286/
Post
recently downloaded pic of a similar adapter
Just for edification, the dinguses hanging off that PCI slot adapter are there to take a couple of the unique select/arbitration lines from two of the motherboard's PCI slots and connect them to the appropriate pins on two of the adapter's slots. PCI isn't a *completely* parallel bus like ISA/S-100/whatever; each slot has a few dedicated lines running from it to the PCI controller to handle selection and arbitration. (In other words, a PCI controller has to know *which* slot a card is in, unlike something like ISA where in theory you could extend the bus infinitely via a passive slot extender, subject to electrical loading and propagation time limitations, and the system will have no clue where on the bus a card is located.) If one or both of them aren't plugged in the associated slots on the riser won't work.

(In theory you *can* add more slots to a PCI slot by using an "active" riser that itself has a PCI-PCI bridge on it. But from a software standpoint that's not completely transparent.)

A 72 pin to 30 pin adapter would need at least 8 connections running from each of the "satellite" SIMM slots to the "main" slot the 72 pin socket's plugged into. Any cables would have to be kept *very* short and shielded, so the thing would be utterly monstrous to plug in. There may also be issues with faster machines experiencing errors because of the almost unavoidable timing "skew" you're going to end up with because of the different total wire lengths for each of the four 8 bit banks. It might work, but it would be an even grosser hack than SIMMsavers were in the first place.

(I never got the point of SIMMsavers. Every time I remember upgrading motherboards to one using a newer memory form factor the price of memory had dropped enough it made more financial sense to just buy more new memory than I had in the first place than try to save the old stuff. I can see some edge cases where if you'd *really* broken the bank maxing the memory on the last machine they might save you a few bucks, temporarily, but... factor in the headaches and it's still a stupid idea.)

mp.ls