Yup. You could put some SRAM or maybe SDRAM+controller on the IDE bus and use this for swap (I think this is what some of the TiVO expansion boards do) but really you just want more RAM.

On a Mk2a you should be able to solder two more EDO RAM chips ontop of the existing ones, with every pin common apart from pin 14. Pin 14 of both chips needs to be taken via white wire to pin 123 of the StrongARM. Bingo! Another 16MB of RAM (total 32).

I suspect that the main board is over-decoupled enough to support this.

Hugo

The original TiVo cachecard did work by putting RAM onto the IDE bus and then using the RAM to cache requests for the database. The guy designing it found that it wasn't very reliable and greatly impacted performance as it would interfere with DMA. I guess this wouldn't really affect the empeg as it doesn't use DMA anyway.

I've just tried this technique on a dead rio receiver; the trick is to straighten the pins as much as possible before bending them hard down. This way, they stick out the bottom enough that soldering the "sandwich" is very easy with a little SMT flux. Only takes 5 minutes or so per chip including bending time.

I was about to take my unit apart to try it when I remembered I have a mk2, not a mk2a. Doh! In theory I could add another 4MB to this to take it to 16, but it's not quite as fun as an extra 16MB!

Hugo

Interesting... I'll have to see if I dare do this on my backup empeg

Stu? Mark? Anyone interested in giving this a shot? Granted, this still assumes a lot, like the kernel being updated to support the extra RAM and the player being able to use it. But it could be an interesting experiment...

It sure would mean you could also do the next harddisk upgrade, and get way with it!

It sure would mean you could also do the next harddisk upgrade, and get way with it!

It would help. It would not answer all of the potential issues, but it would help...

I've triple stacked RAM on one of our products boards for development purposes. What sort of package are the EDO DRAMs in a Mk2a?

Hugo, are they easy enough to obtain? Assuming you've decoupled adequately and I'm sure you have, I very much doubt it will be a problem.

Basically I'm willing to have a go.

I'm keen to have a go at this. I will definitely get enough chips to do 2 or three of my own units here as well.

Anybody got a Digikey part number for the chips?

Cheers

>It would help. It would not answer all of the potential issues, but it would help...

I suppose once I polish off the current contracts here, I could be coerced into making up a new diskbuilder package to remove any limitations from that part of the process. Heck, I think that nearly all of what it does can be done without much fuss (or much added code) from Hijack.

Cheers

I'm keen to have a go at this. I will definitely get enough chips to do 2 or three of my own units here as well.

Anybody got a Digikey part number for the chips?

How many chips do you get on one of those sodding big 18in tape reels for feeding SMT production lines? Because that's how many spare ones we've got. It might not be too hard to persuade Hugo to turn up to Amersfoort with a couple of yards' worth. At 2Mb or 4Mb a pop, or whatever, it's not like they're useful for anything else.

Peter

Ahh.. good potential there!

Any chance of snipping off 3-4 10cm lengths from that reel, dropping them into an envelope, and entrusting the Royal Mail to get them over to Dominion-land here?

Cheers

I don't know why that made me think of this, but I ran across, down here in North Carolina, a Canadian quarter recently, which happens from time to time, but the face of this particular one had George VI on it. Ooooold.

I'm so very down for giving this a go.

Sorry I must be a bit slow but what issues might more ram in the empegs fix?

Sorry I must be a bit slow but what issues might more ram in the empegs fix?

12Mb - can run v3 players. 16Mb - can run debug v3 players, or have a Kanji font, or have more caching so the disk doesn't spin up so often. More than that - can run debug v3 players with a Kanji font, or just have lots more caching. And the more files there are on the player, the bigger the database is, and the more memory it takes up (at the expense of caching).

Peter

No big issues for most of us, other than more buffer space so that the drives don't have to spin as often (safer for the drives that way, in the car).

But for perhaps 20-50 of us, the extra RAM will allow us to have the empeg doing much more than just play music to itself..

Eg. alternative playlist browsers, fancier web applets, on-the-fly database updates (no more 10 minute rebuilds, yay!). Etc.

Cheers

It'll go to 11.

Cool, cool, cool. So playing out the what ifs. If the RAM sandwich works and then Mark works his magic with hijack. Is that it or does the player software need to be changed in some other way?

Shonky's comment about the triple stack is interesting. What's the physical limit on trying something like multiple stacks? Just curious as to what the boundaries would be to expansion.

A

It'll go to 11.

LOL!

/Michael

Sorry I must be a bit slow but what issues might more ram in the empegs fix?

it'll go to 11.

that just went over my head. was it an inside joke that requires study of both user's previous posts, Mach wasn't really replying to JrFaust's post, or am i out of it today, humorwise?

It'll go to 11.

You don't need extra memory to do this.

It's one Louder

too funny.

I'm semi keen to give this a shot. But I'm an Mk2 owner. Is my only option to upgrade to 16 meg? Would this also involve the sandwich trick or replacing the existing chips?

Anyone know what component(s) on the Mk2 limit it from being upgraded to 32 meg?


Thanks,
Aragon

The StrongARM can support 4 banks of EDO DRAM. The models are:

Mk1: 8MB fitted (2 banks of 4MB, 2 chips per bank). Easy to go to 16MB as there are pads on the underside of the board for another 4 chips (2 banks). Needs kernel mod to enable the memory, but this can almost certainly be done within the existing kernel as the kernel sits at the base of physical memory.

Mk2: 12MB fitted (3 banks of 4MB, 2 chips per bank). No spare pads. You could piggyback on one of the banks and get 16MB, adding bank 4.

Mk2a: 16MB fitted (one bank of 16MB, 2 chips per bank). You could piggyback up to 3 sets of chips (given enough vertical space; HDD interference might be a problem) to give you up to 64MB of RAM.

The Mk1/Mk2 chips are 1M x 16. I have shedloads of these (at least 1000 pcs), though you need to run the RAM test on them as maybe 1 in 50 seem to be bad. TSOP-42, with a gap in the pinning at the middle. I doubt you can buy these anymore. Incidentally, you could also use these to get 8Mbytes on a Rio Receiver.

Mk2a are 4M x 16. I have some of these (maybe 100pcs). TSOP-50 package. I think you can still find these about - micron list them as obsolete though. You need the 4k refresh variant (it can't support 8k refresh chips) - they're the same chips as used in the original TiVO memory upgrade, and so are available from http://www.9thtee.com/tivomemory.htm - this is probably the easiest place to get them, and they don't charge the earth for them either ($20). I may try and get some of these chips to someone who might want to do this sort of upgrade (maczrool?) but can't really just send them out individually as it'd take up a bit of time packaging them, as they're in a tray, not on tape.

Note! I've NOT tried this myself yet, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. The only change required is setting the necessary bits at the bottom of MDCNFG (bit 0=bank 0, bit 1=bank 1, etc).

Hugo

Thanks for the info and the link, Hugo. Time to order some ram.

PS - If you are forwarding ram, could you also forward some to mlord?

Hugo,

I am very interested in performing this upgrade to my own (3) Mk2a players as well as to those of others on the BBS. If you can spare 20 or so chips for here, that would likely suffice.

Cheers

Greetings!

I am certainly interested in having it done as well!!!

Yes, same here, for my three players too !!!

By the time you've done yours, Paul's and Robric's you'll need more...