3 ms·
"What you have to realize," said one Atari engineer (I think it was Shiraz Shivji), "Is that DRAMs are really analog components." IIRC the ST was running DRAMs
by kabdib 6y ago
"What you have to realize," said one Atari engineer (I think it was Shiraz Shivji), "Is that DRAMs are really analog components."
IIRC the ST was running DRAMs a few tens of nanoseconds (ten to fifteen percent) faster than they were rated. Not sure exactly why, but I think the ST was running cheap parts faster than they were supposed to go, and it largely got away with it.
Wonder if they played the same games with the refreshed 6502-based systems.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoThey did that so that they could run the Shifter from the memory on the off-cycle of the CPU, right? I mean, it's crazy because it worked and all my STs I have downstairs have never failed, and I don't recall ever having issues with memory chips on them, and I don't recall them ever being unreliable. As for the XE, from reading the forums it sounds like they just used a bad batch of 4164 DRAMs, something to do with them being American made and not Japanese. I seem to remember this was the era of crazy fluctations in memory prices.
- kabdib 6y agoOh yeah, in 1986 Reagan administration introduced tariffs for 64K DRAMs from Japan. I remember having a bunch of trouble tracking the chips down so I could upgrade a 128K Macintosh to a 512K "Fat Mac" (which was easy to do, if you had one of the oddball new Torx bits -- also hard to find -- and a soldering iron stalwart enough to defeat the massive and heatsink-like ground plane on the Mac motherboard). 512K for about $240, IIRC. My first major purchase at Fry's, which had recently bifurcated a supermarket into a "chips" side (with dip) and a "chips" side (with sockets).