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Home Forums 68kMLA Designing a portable RAM card — #185
Post #185 by bigmessowires
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryHardware
Post DateSun, 23 Nov 2014 - 07:03
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/designing-a-portable-ram-card.314/
Post
Backlit needs the /AS jumper. Without it it only sees 5MB. with it I can get all 8MB.

However there is an odd bug. When an application goes into expanded RAM the backlight flickers on and off rapidly with RAM accesses.

If I dont use the /AS wire and cap it at 5mb its perfectly fine.

But my /AS wire was a horrendously long clip lead plus I didnt have /DTACK hooked up either, so that could have been an issue.
Did you ever solve this? Backlight flickering when you access memory above 5MB? I would doubt that the lack of a /DTACK signal has anything to do with it - if the CPU needed /DTACK but it wasn't present, it should just freeze up, or else there might be some external logic that forces a bus error. Either way I think you'd see major software problems, not just a flickering backlight.

My guess is you may have bus contention. Something else is mapped into the memory region above 5MB, and now your RAM card and that something else are trying to drive the bus at the same time. This causes a sudden increase in the power supply current, making the supply voltage droop, and causing the backlight to visibly flicker. The only problem with my theory is that if you had bus contention, you should also also see noise/bad data on the bus, leading to software errors. Maybe the new RAM chips just have more powerful drivers, and overwhelm whatever other thing they're fighting with.

Very nice work!

mp.ls