There are lots of new and exciting projects underway or being talked about on this BBS for the Empeg player but sooner or later we are going to run short of RAM!

Wouldn't it be nice we we could buy/install RAM upgrades!

Just a thought!

Mark.

can't find the thread right now,
but there was someone talking about a company near them that might be willing to take shipment of our units, un solder the 12 mb of RAM in them and resolder up to 256 MB RAM.
That would be nice...
I cant imaging 256 MB RAM would cost more that $25 for the part, so if you figure $40 in shipping that would leave $35 for the labor and you'd come right in at a $100 upgrade.
Whoever makes this happen Gets my $100...

mmmmmm, more ram, sounds so interesting!!!!

I'll have to rip the lid off one of my players and have a peek inside to see what kind of chips it takes, maybe I can do a bit of DIY!!!!

I cant imaging 256 MB RAM would cost more that $25 for the part

Are there any homes for sale in this mythical world you live in where 256 MB RAM chips are $25?

PC RAM chips of that size are in the $50 range, and I don't know much about the Empeg's RAM, but due to their smaller size and the fact that they're not standard chips, I'd imagine they would cost even more...

Unless you wrote your own new software for the player, the extra RAM wouldn't do you any good. Any existing software would not take advantage of any extra RAM you installed.

So if you needed to do a custom software project that required the extra RAM, then it would be useful. But the amount of difficulty involved in installing extra RAM into the car player is significant. It's not something just anyone can do. It doesn't plug in, it's all SMT and very delicate.

Just trying to upgrade the RAM without having a specific need for it wouldn't be an efficient use of your time.

Did you have some specific piece of software you wanted to write which needed the RAM? What did you have in mind?

I'll have to rip the lid off one of my players and have a peek inside to see what kind of chips it takes, maybe I can do a bit of DIY!!!!

This won't really happen, in all probability.

The Mk2 players use 6off 16Mbit chips, the MK2a uses 2 off 64Mbit chips. These
are smt EDO chips, not easy to obtain in small quantities. For instance, for the initial
run of players empeg had to buy the chips on reels of 1500. The SA1100 allows
up to 4 banks of ram, which from memory can be up to 64MB (it might be 256MB,
I'd have to check the datasheet to be sure). The mk2 has three banks, and the 2a
has one.

The Mk2 players can't really have any more ram added at all, since the capacitive
loading of the relevant lines is near maximum, and the board layout doesn't allow it.

In theory, it might be possible to add more ram to the Mk2A players, by stacking
another pair of chips on top of the existing ones and connecting the extra bank
select lines directly to the SA1100, but this isn't easy.

In addition, the low-level bootloader (the one that is resident in the protected boot
block of the flash) is ultimately responsible for enabling the ram banks. This only
turns on the ones that are actually used to stop the other select lines wobbling
merrily away and giving off excess RFI. The bootloader would have to be patched
to enable extra ram, as fiddling with the memory setup at this level in the kernel
isn't recommended. An issue here is that if this initial bootloader is screwed, you
have to unsolder the flash and reprogram it externally.

Yet more issues are related to the memory mapping in the kernel, which would
need to be made aware of the extra memory. This is the least of the problems, to
be honest.

I'm not saying that technically it isn't possible, but on the whole it's almost certainly
more trouble than it's worth.

pca

ohh, technically a nighmare to add extra ram - enough said!!!!!

To be honest, I am personally interested in OBD2 (on-board engine diagnostics) but I know there is also a lot of interest in Sat/Navigation, both would benifit if they could be written in "other" memory so they didn't have any overhead on music buffering and plenty of scope for loading images etc "elsewhere" in ram!

But if it's going to be a nightmare, back to slim-line programming I think!

I am personally interested in OBD2 (on-board engine diagnostics) but I know there is also a lot of interest in Sat/Navigation

Neither of which need extra RAM to get the job done....

I think people are so trained by the fact that Windows requires 256 MB to get anything done that they think the solution to problems on any device is to add more RAM.

now dont forget with windows xp to get anything done you need 512

Well, now, on the player if you want to skip 10 songs real quick using the right button,
you get stuck waiting for the disk(s) to spin up.
With 256 MB of RAM, you could have the next 60 songs (or so)
of the current songlist buffered into RAM.
That would be nice.
It could also be smart enough to keep the last 10 songs you heard in RAM in case you want to rewind a few songs and hear that one.
I know this is a mundane use for all the work involved in replacing (adding) the RAM,
but it serves as one useful thing you could do with all that RAM.

Well, now, on the player if you want to skip 10 songs real quick using the right button, you get stuck waiting for the disk(s) to spin up. With 256 MB of RAM, you could have the next 60 songs (or so) of the current songlist buffered into RAM. That would be nice.

No. It would not do this if you added extra RAM. And since the software which controls the caching is closed-source, it will not ever do this.

I have added a new FAQ entry on this subject.

Point taken about ram usage, both OBD and Sat/Nav can be written within tight memory restraints but they would run much more efficiently with more memory buffers!

Being able to buffer more map data for example will vastly improve the route planning speed and ability!

To be honest it's not really an issue though because if it's technically a nightmare to add extra ram then it's not even worth considering!

I'll be watching both topics with interest and pleased to see any progress,

Anyway, thanks for your comments,

or what about the recording feature that was discussed here a quick "start recording" button and it records to the more than ample RAM area, allowing the hard drives plenty of time to spin up and catch up to the encoding stream.
I know these ideas I post are crazy.

Also brings me to a voice note feature that wouldn't require so much ram, using the microphone, you could save voice notes... like my cell phone does. Gonna go search for that idea now, see if anyone has posted it yet, I'm sure they have.

I think it's not fair to say people think extra ram is the solution to everything ....

It's true that the decent programmers could perform the amlost impossible with the ledgendary Sinclair ZX Spectrum and other early computers .... but ....

The more demands you make on a system, the more complex the enviroment, the more call for buffering and larger ram!

Woow, I'm impressed so many people have so many comments to make about such a simple idea!

ok, fair enough, I've read the FAQ and I accept that extra ram isn't really feasable .... but I still remember the days of being told that 64MB Ram in a PC was a luxury and I'd never have enough software to fill it!!!!!

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for their comments on this topic,

Cheers,

Mark.

I was just commenting on the Windows-driven mentality that you need 768 MB of RAM to have a fast machine. Software is SO bloated nowadays and it's refreshing to see a machine that can do so much on 12 or 16 MB of memory. As a software developer in an environment where conservation of CPU and memory resources is critical, I love devices like the Empeg. Seeing my version management software at work taking up 45 MB of RAM, or my UML design software taking up 150 MB, makes me want to vomit.

You're right in that buffering/caching is great, and database servers with a few gigs of memory make sense... But the fact that a modern day workstation basically requires 256 or 512 MB of RAM is insane. To run Word, Excel, and browse the occasional web page...

Sorry, you're not going to get me to budge on this one...

Adding ram seems quite complex, and it seems like there's a simpler solution. I know i've seen flash ram drives with an IDE interface, and I'm fairly sure i've heard of SDRAM drives with ide interfaces. Seeing as laptop drives now come in sizes up to 60GB and won't stop there, a very reasonable mp3 collection could be assembled on one drive leaving the other one to use as very low latency scratch space for your programming projects.

Flash would be a bad solution, as its life cycle is limited, but SDRAM would work well. It would of course only be useful for software that you wrote yourself, but then again no one thinks that extra ram would help with the player software...

Why don't we just hook up one of those keychain things to the USB port? <GRIN> (it's a joke. read the FAQ)

FYI, there is no technical reason whatsoever why windows xp should need more memory than windows 2000. The quite popular belief that windows xp needs more ram memory than windows 2000 does not match reality. Windows XP may actually need less ram in several situations due to a more optimized ram mamangement. Your estimate ("512Mb to get anything done") is pessimistic.

256 MB or ram would be silly and obviously not necessary, especially with the competency level of some of the programmers on this board, kudos to you all, you know who you are.
All I'm saying is if there were 64 or 256 MB of RAM on the empeg, we'd all be using it.
I've got 768 on my K62-500 and I use 512 of it as a RAMDRIVE, just 'cause I can. Really helps out with Photoshop, etc. It would be nice to have it just cause we could. Same reason some of us bout the empeg and put 3 months of music on it in the first place.
Because we can.

Also, what about Mark 2a having 133% of the RAM that a Mark 2 has, and double the RAM the Mark 1 has. How does the "closed source" software of the player that manages RAM account for the discrepancy ?

I think you miss my point, I agree that bloating a machine with ram isn't an alternative solution to writing tight code in the first place,

my comment is that in your example you used 45MB to do a 150MB piece of code, you STILL used 45MB which just wouldn't fit on the Empeg!

I totally agree and as a programmer myself I put a lot of effort into writing tight/fast code and not bloatware, but sometimes you just can't get a pint into a half pint glass!

Cheers for your comments Matthew - but - have you ever noticed how your computers performance suddenly slows down to about 10% normal when you run out of ram and start cashing ram to hard disk?

It is a way however to achieve what would otherwise be impossible!!!!!

I agree with you. I dare to say that almost every OS would largely benefit from extra ram memory, which simply means a less extensive usage of the swap file, a better caching system, and so on. On one of my computers I have 1 Gb of RAM simply because I happened to have the dimms with me and used them. No disk access at all, almost. And, as you say, with applications like Photoshop you may well end up using it all. However, the statement according to witch to get anything done WinXP requires 512Mb of ram is not correct, and I was commenting on that.

As to what I read here, if I am not mistaken, the empeg player application is currently designed to take advantage of only the 16Mb ram on board, so an increase of ram memory would not be enough. You would need ALSO to patch the player application so that it can exploit the largfer amt of ram available.

Yes, i understand swapping far more than I'd like to, honestly. The point was not to add swap space on a normal hard drive, but on something that was composed of SDRAM or Flash. These have no rotational latency nor time for the head to seek, though you'd still be going through the IDE interface which would be slower.

Flash disks are available now, basicaly a compact flash card with an IDE interface. A search on google failed to turn up a drive using ram as the storage medium, so it's possible I was halucinating on that one, but I know it's not an orginal idea, so maybe i'm just not searching for the right terms.

You would need ALSO to patch the player application so that it can exploit the largfer amt of ram available.

Exactly. And since the player app is closed-source, that won't be happening any time soon.

>You would need ALSO to patch the player application
>so that it can exploit the largfer amt of ram available.

Really? I'm not as sure about that. To me, it looks like the player software just grabs all available ram, minus a preset offset (which can be overridden in config.ini), for track buffering.

But don't look to me to hack more ram into my players.

Cheers

No, it doesn't grab all ram. Get too close to the limits and linux gets very upset. We went through a lot of this and in-depth investigations of 2.2's vm subsystem. Not sure what might happen if you used a negative number for reservecache though...!

Hugo

on-board engine diagnostics would be cool. Especially if you could get some visualizations of the engine performance. I can see live bar graphs showing the spark power or compression for each cylinder.

Steve

Already working OBD (on-board diagnostics) - we'll have a laptop software version running first, then the hope is to port the software to empeg!

Don't hold your breath though, could be a few months off yet, still waiting for the hardware to interface between car and computer!

Sweet! Keep us up to date!


Steve

Hi Hugo.

No, it doesn't grab all ram. Get too close to the limits and linux gets very upset.

Doesn't that basically summarize what mlord said: Grab all RAM minus a preset offset (which might or might not be proportional to the total amount of system RAM).
Let me ask it the other way: If I would successfully add more RAM to my MkII(a), patch the boot loader and get the Linux kernel to recognize and use it (so that it is reported in /proc/meminfo), would the actual player binary automatically allocate more RAM for buffering? Or would it basically stick to the amount of RAM it would expect on a MkII(a)?
Also: I seem to remember that someone from empeg (you?) said that the MkIIa board design actually provides the soldering pads for additional RAM (on the back side of the board?), is that right? Or was that on a non-public board design?

cu,
sven

That was the mk 1 board.

Sean

If you need a OBD-2 to 9-pin RS-232 connector, I have one that I use for datalogging. You can buy it off me if it helps you develop the software any faster. How about $75? The cable is I think originally $125. (From what I understand, the cable is cheap, the OBD-2 connector is expensive!).

Calvin

The 16 PIN ODB connector can be ordered as a one off sample from pioneer standard.

There are details for building an ISO interface and pioneers part numbers here

PeterK