If you think RAM is expensive now, try putting yourselves in the shoes of a Commodore engineer, circa 1981. RAM was eye-wateringly expensive by modern standards, and Jack Tramiel wanted 64K of the stuff for the next computer– hence the name, Commodore 64– but he didn’t want to pay for it. The solution was to use cheaper dynamic RAM over the more expensive static RAM that later took over the market in the kilobyte range. That’s a small problem for retrocomputer hobbiests, because while we’re complaining about the price of gigabytes of the stuff, you can’t buy new DRAM chips that fit a Commodore at any price. That’s why [Fabio Battaglia] aka [hkzlab] came up with an adapter board to fit easily-available SRAM chips onto aging C64s.
Nothing lasts forever– not cold September rain, and not DRAM chips. Heat damage? Internal corrosion? There are probably multiple failure modes, but someday the old stock of chips will run out and the retrocomputer community is going to be ready for it. [Keith Olson] sent us a tip on a video by [The Retro Shack]– embedded below, and thanks for the tip, [Keith]!–about this very problem, that serves as a good demo of what you get when you put SRAM into a C64. That said, the adapter board on offer is only good for C64s with the 250407 motherboard. If yours is different, you may have to modify the board– but hey, it’s open source, so go ye and do that thing. Let us know via the tips line if you do.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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