Today I decided to upgrade another of my Mk2a players to 32MB RAM by stacking a chip on top of each of the two existing chips. My eyesight is not as sharp as it once was, and my memory definitely isn't!

I put the two chips on using the ultra-fine 0.1mm tip on the soldering iron. BIG mistake. That tip is way too small to hold sufficient heat or sufficient solder. After fussing for a while trying to get the new chips to pass the memory test, I clued in and put the 1/32" tip on the iron instead, and then re-soldered all of the pins. Worked first try after that!

One useful thing I saw while fussing around during the non-functional stage, was that the Hijack memory test has had a slight bug. I got this message and the player continued without recognizing the extra RAM:

So.. it wrote ffffffff and read ffffffff.. but still failed the test? BUG! Hijack wasn't caching the readback value for use in the error message, so when printing the wrote/read message it actually read it AGAIN.. getting the correct value after first having read an incorrect value. So I've fixed that now (Hijack v525 will be out shortly), and also added the missing mb() memory barrier there too.

So.. anyone else doing a new memory upgrade would be best served to have Hijack v525 installed before doing the upgrade.

Cheers!