Hi.

Well, the PCBs for the 64MB memory boards are in manufacture at the moment. I will have a few in a couple of weeks, which will be built and tested, then assuming everything is OK a batch will be made immediately afterwards. The first run, which will probably be 35 (which the the number I have parts on hand for) should be available around the first week in april or thereabouts.

The cost will be £100 plus shipping, which will, as per the tuners, be £5 for the UK, £7 for europe, and £10 for the rest of the universe.

I intend this project to be self-funding, unlike the tuner kits which were, frankly, a money-pit. What this means is that I will make smallish batches, sell them out, and make more using the income from the previous lot. To this end, I will take firm orders rather than potential interest offers, and make a new batch when there are enough to make it viable. I would expect this will be anything upwards of 25 at a go.

The boards will be added to the website when they're available. I have been wondering whether I should accept orders via email from the BBS, but I'm not sure of the best way to do it. What would be ideal from my point of view is an order accompanied by payment, on the understanding that the boards would take up to about 6 weeks to ship from any particular moment (this gives time for the PCBs to be made and built, since I'm not doing it myself), but I can understand that people might not think this ideal from their point of view. Any suggestions or preferences?

The turnround time on these thing will be much better than the tuner kits, since the bill of materials is much simpler (8 ram chips, 16 capacitors, 4 resistors, a dip switch, and a PCB), and there is nothing on it that should present much availability problem. That said, things have a habit of proving me wrong on this sort of matter

IN addition to the above, there remains one slight problem. This upgrade requires some reasonably skilled and careful solder work to fit, and will be MUCH harder to remove than attach. The PCB is designed to fit over the test pads on the bottom of the MK2/2A motherboards, which are then soldered through the mating holes on the memory board. There are about 50 holes that need to be dealt with in this way. If a mistake is made, the unsoldering process would be annoyingly fiddly.

For a MK2A board, one patch wire (RA3) will need to be brought from the CPU to a pad on the memory expansion board to give the full 64MB, otherwise only 48MB will be available.

For a MK2, in addition to the patch wire the onboard ram will need to be disabled. This could be done either by lifting a pin on each ram chip and connecting it to +3.3V to disable the chip, or preferably by removing the chips completely. The latter method avoids capacitively loading the data and address busses excessively, which might possibly cause problems under some circumstances.

Now, while there are certainly quite a few members of this board who could do this work easily, I'm sure there are many more who would not feel too confident in their abilities on a job like this. Also, I'm equally sure there are some who would feel confident, but would be wrong

I'm not sure what the best method to deal with this is. I don't really have time to sit here fitting memory boards, unfortunately, as I need to attempt to earn some sort of living. I would think that various BBS members may well wish to offer their services, presumably for a fee, and I have no problem with this. However, obviously I can't offer a guarantee on the functionality of an empeg I haven't dealt with myself.

I would suggest that if people do offer a fitting service, it would make sense to ship only the motherboard rather than the complete unit, wherever possible, as the costs involved would be kept to a minimum.

Any questions or insults?

pca