Ram disk Card unknown

humeur · August 10, 2019

Who among you could give me information on this card which must be a RAM Disk.

He noted JST 1987.

Thank

Jean Louis

+Ksarul · August 10, 2019

The initials might be from J. Stimac, but that is only a guess. The board does have a lot of style similarities with the Australian Quest 200 RAM Disk. They put the batteries in the same area of the board and put the RAM chips in the same places (two rows at the top of the board). There are differences though--they used only a small number of LS chips, combining a lot of the logic into a pair of PALs. They also put the spare 32K chip at the other end of the board, leaving the top left corner empty. Looking at it, it is just like the Quest capability-wise. It would be expandable to 512K as a RAM Disk, with an additional 32K chip to replace the TI 32K memory card. That 32K is switch selectable, so you can turn it off if you don't need it.

This board is also about a year older than the Quest boards (1987 vs. 1988), so it may have been an early test board--or it may have come from a completely different source that had similar ideas. I hope this helps.

humeur · August 11, 2019

Thank you Jim for your knowledge, I do not remember this card at all during my visit to Wiesbaden.

Where do we find the software that manages this? And the schematic of Quest 200 RAM Disk

Jean Louis

+Ksarul · August 11, 2019

As I noted on the Facebook side, I am pretty sure the card came from Juergen Stelter from the TI Workshop Wiesbaden. I don't think he made many of these. On software, I would suggest trying to see if the Horizon ROS would recognize it. Treat it as a 512K board for formatting purposes.

Here are the schematics for the Quest, although due to their use of PALs for a lot of the control logic, they may not help much.

A3-Quest 200 RAM Disk-P1.pdf A3-Quest 200 RAM Disk-P2.pdf