REVIEW OF AN AUSTRALIAN 2 MEG RAM EXPANSION BOARD



	It is a welcome change to be able to review a locally produced
   product which holds its own against the imported variety - "import
   substitution" as Mr Keating would have it, and let's hope there's a
   lot more of it, if only for the improved prices.

	PROTON MICROELECTRONICS is the company responsible, and they are
   based in Adelaide. Their range of RAM expansion boards includes 512K,
   1024K and 2048K versions. The one I have tested is the 2 MEG (or 2048K)
   and it is a Non-autoconfigure board - I am assured by Proton that their
   AutoConfigure versions (for 1.2 software only) will be available
   anytime now, for $95 extra on the prices they are currently
   charging. Proton also assures me that the boards are compatible with
   Sidecar (and they are, by a recent test), and that the boards
   are designed to chew up little power due to their "Low Power CMOS
   Design", thus allowing 4 of their 2 MEG boards to be added to the
   side expansion port of the Amiga, giving a remarkable 8 MEG and more!
   Having had the extra 2 MEG available for some time now, it isn't
   too hard to find a use for so much RAM... it
   is remarkable how memory demands rise to meet availability, and, e.g.,
   people who want to create symphonies of sampled sound will find ways
   to use such quantities.

	Installing the unit was a simple matter of pushing it into the
   side expansion port (with power off); copying the two commands ADDMEM
   and MEMINSTALL into the C directory of the boot disk; and adding the
   command MEMINSTALL in the startup-sequence in the S directory. Booting
   up then shows a message saying "some expansion memory found" and it's
   all available for use. If you happen to have a Sidecar, your startup-
   sequence will say Meminstall -Sidecar, and if you've had the "Kickstart
   in ROM" upgrade done, you'll type in  -kickram  as well. The board
   also comes with an optional clock, worth getting so that you can
   forever forget entering the time and date. Note that all the above
   will be unnecessary if you buy the Autoconfiguring version - the 1.2
   software will handle it all for you.

	The appearance of the unit is neat and pretty compact - it is
   beige-coloured, practically the same as the Amiga, and when sitting
   in the port rises about 3 cm above the CPU, and extends from behind
   the joystick port to the back of the CPU. It's housed in a metallic
   casing, and of course has a Pass-Through Bus connecting up more units.
   An inspection of the innards of the board by a friend who is a
   computer engineer revealed solid workmanship in the construction.
   The documentation which comes with the board, both on paper and on
   a disk was quite sufficient to understand what to do with the thing.
   Another option provided is an Analogue to Digital Converter for those
   involved in more technical pursuits, and a 6 month warranty is
   also provided.

	So those are the facts, but is it worth getting? And how does it
   work in practice? The best use for such a board, in my opinion, is
   for setting up a "Recoverable RAM Disk" (RRD). The great virtue of
   such a device is, as its name implies, that if the computer hangs, or
   you get a Guru, you can re-boot with the same boot disk and everything
   that you had in RAM is still sitting there, blithely unaware of any
   crash. This makes you feel warm and secure, since you can use the
   speed of RAM without its transience. So, for example, I load my full
   customised Workbench into RAM (or the virtual device  VD0:, to be
   precise), remove the actual disk and carry on as before with much
   greater speed, and with a disk drive freed up. And since the total
   RAM of the system comes to over 2.5 MEG, there is still about 1.6 MEG
   available for other uses. A company called ASDG in the US has made
   available such a RRD on Fish Disk 58 as shareware, and it works very
   nicely with the Proton board. Such a set-up would also work with the
   1 MEG board with room to spare, and if you got the half-MEG board
   you would probably make a slimmed down RRD with just the basic
   commands and libraries.

	As noted in the documentation, there are some programs which
   don't run with Expansion RAM, notably Deluxe Paint I, which uses
   "Chip" memory (your original 512K of RAM) exclusively. Most programs
   are fully compatible with expansion RAM however and will look for it
   and use it if it's there. I noticed that a couple of little utilities
   had problems, for example the "ChangeKickStart" utility, which allows
   you to change your Kickstart disk over without turning off the
   computer. On the other hand, I loaded the entire PageSetter program
   into RAM and found that performance was much improved, especially
   the speed of refreshing or changing of the display.

	All in all, considering the facts that these are Australian
   products of good quality and very competitive pricing, and that the
   addition of more RAM makes your Amiga purr with pleasure and speed,
   I would recommend these boards highly. If you want a little more
   ease of installation, wait perhaps for the Auto-Configuring versions.
   But if you're finding that you're beginning to reach the limits of
   your 512K fairly regularly, consider such a purchase. The Amiga was
   made for it, especially since it's a multi-tasking machine, and
   you'll find quite a leap in performance. Of course, my problem is that
   now that I tried it for review purposes, I couldn't do without it, and
   had to fork out and buy it.

   * See next issue for how to make the most of extra RAM.

						      by Tim Strachan


	SOURCE:     Proton MicroElectronics P/L
		    Tel: (08) 2770323


	PRODUCTS:   512 K RAM board ... $470
		    1024 K RAM board ... $590
		    2048 K RAM board ... $980
		    Clock $95 extra
		    AutoConfigure extra (soon available)


	AVAILABILITY: Some dealers or from Proton direct. 


		       END OF RAMBOARD.RVW