Title    : Amega RAM Board Review    | Electronic Arcs
By       : Kelly Adams               | Volume 1, Number 2
Filename : Hardware1                 | (c) 1987, Brad Grier & Authors
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PRODUCT:  The Amega RAM Board 
MANUFACTURER: C Ltd.  
PRICE: $550 Canadian

Everyone who has an Amiga has experienced it:  the dreaded
"Insufficient Memory" error...or worse yet, a visit with the Guru.  A
serious user taking advantage of multi-tasking might very well find
himself restricted to running entirely trivial applications: most good
spreadsheets for the Amiga, as an example, suck up nearly 400k of RAM.
So, the obvious answer is to upgrade your RAM from a measly 512k to
something reasonable, like a megabyte or so.  Unfortunately, the mega-
prices of boards like the Comspec leaves most people out of the memory
market simply due to budget constraints.  And then there are all these
things to worry about, like buss pass through and wait states and auto
configuration.  Its enough to make you go back to running one program
at a time...almost.  Just recently, however, a number of new memory
cards have cropped up that solve all or most of these problems: of
these, (including the Allegra, the Rambo, etc, etc), the one I finally
settled on was the Amega.  Sure, its only one megabyte of RAM, but I
think I made the right choice.  What follows is an overview of my
experiences with the board.  

DAY 1, 14:30- Board arrives in good condition.  Examine decent box (a
hardware box with information:  heaven forbid!).  Open box.  Spend
almost five minutes trying to pull board out of firmly wedged
styrofoam.  Realize that "board" does not do justice to the heavy
gauge steel box I have in hands.  Describe kindly as "homely"
(although it is the right colour and size to fit my Amiga).  Read over
docs (about 10 pages).  Examine photocopy notifying me that my board
has no ram chips installed.  Notice end paragraph, offering to fix any
board damaged during setup, regardless of condition (so long as it is
still physically in one piece), for $50 U.S.  Am very impressed, and
much calmed.  

15:00- Take case apart: screws and washers fall all over the place (I
wish the instructions would have warned me).  Spend five minutes
carefully finding dozen or so nylon washers.  Examine PC board: looks
decent, with only one or two signs of last minute changes.  Everything
is socketed, and no noticeable weird (READ: hard to find replacement
parts for) chips are about.  Carefully install 32 41256 150 ns RAM
chips.  Put board back in case and screw back together (spending
another five minutes fitting nylon washers (used as spacers) back in.  

15:15- Attach board to computer (AFTER TURNING POWER OFF!!).  Fits
neatly:  new connectors require considerable force to get them to seat
on expansion port.  Boot Kickstart 1.2.  Insert Workbench 1.2 and jump
for joy when 1.4 Mb free is displayed at the top of screen.  Fun
Stuff!!  

All in all, it was simple to get up and running.  A disk is included
with the necessary routines to make the board recognizable under pre-
kickstart 1.2.  Also on the disk are memory test routines (you have to
boot under kickstart 1.1 to use these) and a bunch of little utilities
to do things like correct old programs that don't use expanded memory
properly and the like.  Admittedly, much of this is public domain, but
thats ok by me.  The Amega is obviously an Autoconfigure
(automatically recognized by Kickstart/Workbench 1.2) board; it is
also no wait state, and full pass through.  There is only one catch to
the full pass through part of the deal: for cost reasons, C Ltd does
not include the actual connector you would require to add additional
devices to the expansion buss.  You can order the little connector for
something like $20 U.S., so it isn't a big deal.  The case the board
is in is a chunky metal thing with few redeeming design attributes
beyond the fact that it is solid, RF shielding, the right colour, the
correct size,....  well, even so, it still isn't aesthetically
pleasing.  However, I don't buy my memory based on how pretty its box
is.  For those of you with major memory needs, the Amega is "only" one
megabyte of RAM, so its possible that it won't satisfy requirements. 
On the other hand, it uses ordinary off the shelf RAM chips, rather
than the funny things most 2 meg boards are using, so its more
serviceable.  All in all, I give a very hearty thumbs up to the Amega:
no question, its the best of the memory board crop to come along so
far for general memory upgrade needs.  Then again, maybe you wanted a
pretty box...