Different ways to Upgrade an Apple II or Apple ][+ or Apple ][ europlus or äquivalent clone
      to 192 kByte ( or 208 kByte RAM with language card ) ( change from 4116 RAM to 4164 RAM )
 
 aa At first view of the clone-mainboard below the apple][+-clone does not seem to be that very special.... the few extra chips at the top donīt seem to be that very important to realy make remarks about.... - but after a short closer view to the chips on  the board one very important point turns out to be very different from all other normal clone boards... the RAM-chips are not the commenly used 4116 chips used to populate nearly every usual clone board  and that end up with one point : there are not the usual 48 kB RAM on board that require the additional 16 kb of the language card to reach the goal of 64 kB RAM.

Instead this board is populated with 4164 chips and the addition comes up with the result that there are allready 196 kByte of RAM on the mainboard - an amount of RAM that no normal cloneboard would be able to gain with.....  thatīs even more RAM than the later sold Apple//e came along with... the Apple //e only had with the commonly used 80col expansion card a total of only 128 kB !

That makes any viewer curious ... how was it possible to populate a Apple ][+ with the 4164 chips ? This chips have different use of the pins and they require completely different supply-voltages.... and in fact that isnīt the only trouble... the 6502 only can adress up to 64 kByte by direct adressing.... how can the RAM with adressing above 64 kByte be managed ??? ... and how could this be solved with only 3 additional chips ?

... and whats the purpose of the switch up there ? ( the solution to that question is the most simple one to answer: the switch enables the user to switch between 48 kByte-Mode and 196 kByte-Mode and in one position the Board is 100% compatible with the Apple ][+ and in the other position itīs in the upgraded 196 kByte-mode.
aa
   
     
 
This modification above is based on the published instructions of the german cīt magazin and the details were published in the february edition of 1987. The description was scanned and converted to pdf-format due to the fact that there is no possibility to re-order that issue of the magazin anymore and this description should be rescued to the access of the apple community as content of heritage importance.

In fact the description of the modification does not only explain the mod from replacing the regular clones with 4164 chips instead of the 4116 chips - but it also contains explanation how to perform the mod with those clone versions that instead are populated with one row of 4164 chips and instead replace them with selected 41256 chips !

And the description also contains the listings of the machinecodeprograms that are used to access the additional memory !

in the instructions of the modification at the pdf-file below the modification is shown with the cabeling executed on an additional breadboard / testboard here the modification and the additional 3 chips have been placed in the spare area of a cloneboard.
For the purpose to disable crashes of a system by just performing the mod and not taking care of the needed mod of the languagecard too - this photo shows the mod without use of the language card.
 
     
   
     
 
this view of the bottom side of the entire cloneboard above permits a view of the entire modification itself .

the wiring in the top left corner is not related to the 4116 to 4164 upgrade. It is only related to another mod that permits to switch the cpu from 1.xx Mhz operation to 2.xx Mhz operation mode.
The text to that mod will be treated in a later publishing of another page on "tuning" of the cpu on cloneboards

- and the second switch is related to the switching of the character ROM from german to english version and vice versa

-  and the third switch is related to the hardswitching of the 80-card.

the picture at the left is a closer view to the details of the wiring.
 
 



 
 
  The Cram-Apple Upgrade Version

The cramapple-version of the modification for example uses the four annunciators of the gameport to switch the banks of the RAM to the upfront of the adressing and access of the 6502 and the additional RAM-space is used as a RAM-peudo-floppy-disk that emulates a floppydisk. The software availiable to this modification permits to load software from floppydrive to the additional RAM-space and flush the content od that pseudofloppy to a disk in s diskdrive. The cramapple-modification-software only operates with DOS. It is the first kind of this modification published in the public.


 

link to disk image will be added soon.

aaa

 


description Cramapple
( english )
           
  The Phantom-RAM Upgrade Version

The Phantom is in fact just nearly the same an the cram-apple-modification with one important difference of the software quite similar to the cram-apple-modification and could in fact - related to the hardware part of the modification just be claimed to ba a later german-translationm of the modification working with the same trick. But due to the fact that this modification had been published later the guys that had distributed this german version had performed some kind of update to the software and the software distributed with the hardware-chip-kit and instruction offered a disk that not only offered the use of the pseudo-disk in DOS but additional software that permitted the use of the floppy-emulation also with apple-UCSD-pascal and with CPM !

In fact this modification was published and the hardware ( chips and socket ) about 2 years later than the cram-apple-modification and it can be called a clone of the cram-apple-modification except the fact of the additional software extension to UCSD-Pascal and CPM.

 

link to disk image will be added soon.

 


description
PhantomRAM
( german )
           
  The ctī RAM Upgrade Version

The cīt version of the modification is the latest and most sophisticated version of the upgrade from 48 kB to 192 kB. The first big difference is the fact that it is complete different from the other both modifications in the point that it does NOT USE THE GAMEPORT as a specific "adress / bank / switching" like the other two modifications.

The other two modifications always had the lack that the additional software and a part of the hardware had to be deactivated if the apple was used with games that offered use of the switches of the paddles or joystick. That wasnīt a real disadvantage at the early days of the apple ][ - because in those days there were only very few games availiable to the apple ][.

And another big difference was that the both other versions in fact basicaly could only be used with the pseudo-disk-emulation. The use by the programmer for additional RAM-work-area for example as additional hires-/ or lores-pages in the software was restricted by the fact that the TPA area conflicted with the "primary-original-RAM-bank" and that for example made difficulties while compilation of the programs with a compiler.

This new modification offered an entire new kind of access to the additional memory and it offered not only the use as RAM-disk but in fact the user could also use the additional memory with slight modification also to get CPM 3.0 running at this kind of modification ! The big difference is that this modification uses own chips for the decoding of the additional RAM and therefor there is no conflict with any game and it is the genious coup of this modification that the relevant "switches" that are requested for the handling of the additional RAM are in fact related to the area reserved for the cassette interface and some unused area located within the area of the slots but unused area above and below of the real slots !

This is in fact a complete new and alternative kind of modification. The modification to the cloneboard above at the entry of this page is based on the  c`t modification !

Throughout the developement of the different 3 modifications in the time from 1979 till February 1987 ( when this modification had been published in the german c`t magazine) I have performed on 3 clone-boards each of the modifications and finaly the last one published in cīt was the one that finally convinced me.

The fact that it offered a switch to simply ensure the compatibility to original apple ][ was the one argument and the second was the fact that adressing was performed with "switch-code-area" that was located in an reserved and unused adressspace that ensured that no conflict will occure with any other kind of software due to the fact that this area is really abandoned by any kind of regular software and the fact that the cassetteinterface is out of use for years due to the fact that in normal systems only disks or harddisks are used as storage devices.

At the moment iīm locked up in several private duties and therefor this modification is just introduced in short scetch and without translations - but in 4 to 5 months when the running "tasks" have been solved iīll take myself time to perform translation of the german text to english.

aaa

link to disk image will be added soon.

 

 

translated description
 of the cīt- modification
in english language



description
ctīmodification
( german )