Fellow Hobbyists,
Hi, I’m new here, but I’ll been reading this forum for years. I’ve been looking for a good way to test the ram on my various Apple II’s, Clone, and 16K RAM cards. Since I didn’t find a readymade solution, I decided to create my own and I would like your thoughts on this project. It is based on the work of several others:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVZYB54VD2g
https://forum.defence-force.org/viewtopic.php?p=15035&sid=17bf402b9c2fd97c8779668b8dde2044
To keep it simple, I use a step-up voltage module and a reverse voltage module. It’s powered through the Nano (I covered the Nano LEDs as I find these really annoying). It seems to work well, and after testing almost a hundred ram chips, I found several bad on an unused 16K card I have. I totaled up the parts cost, and it’s around $18.
Thanks,
DDE
It looks like you've done a good job of it.
Are you planning on selling the PCB's?
Hi, yes, eventually. But I'm really looking to help support the vintage computer community (Apple II) as so many others have (and so many on this forum have).
-DDE
Could it be easily adapted to test the 4K x 1 RAM chips found in the Apple I ?
(During the past 4 months my own Apple I build was blocked most of the time by running DRAM tests. So far I found 1 truly bad DRAM (which even spat into the bus so that the monitor program produced lots of superflous stars but almost worked) and 6 suspect / flakey ones out of more than 200 of various brands (Intel, Mostek, Motorola).
Seems that 40+ year old NOS DRAM really need some thorough testing !
Beware that some of the faults / bit disturbances take a lot of observation time to find (I use 1 week running Mike Willegals RAM test 24/7).
Back in the day when the radiation sensitiviy issue with DRAMs was discovered (around early 1980s ???) some daring engineers used DRAMs as an altimeter and it worked well enough to marvel at the perils of living at high altitude.
Anyway, if you make PCBs please consider to test 4k x 1 and 64k x 1 DRAMs, too. And some option to run tests for a long time without any user intervention.
Of course there are lots of other DRAMs. But for 1970/80s vintage microcomputers the 4k x 1, 16k x1, and 64k x 1 as used in the Apple I, II, IIc ... will cover a lot of ground.
Have you had a chance to work on any kits? I would frankly be happy to pay good money for multiple, pre-assembled testers, as testing 4116s is something that I need to do quite often and I have never used Arduino kit, so I would be wading in to an ocean with a rubber duck as a life vest. I should invest time into learning the Arduino kit, but I am three years behind in so many projects that the sheer convenience of being able to buy an off the shelf tester for 4116s is to me, quite justified.
Did you ever come by this project: https://8bit-museum.de/sonstiges/hardware-projekte/hardware-projekte-chip-tester-english/
This device can test multiple memory chips, also the 4116 and onther ICs.
I would love a device like this that tested more than just 16K chips. If it could do the 64KB chips in the IIe/iic (etc) or even the 256Kb chips on the IIgs I would buy one! that would be great.. But honestly just 16KB makes it too specialized. And most machines I have that use those chips have sockets so I can test rather easy anyway..
Hi, I hope to add the ability to test multiple types of RAM chips.
-DDE
-Also, sorry for not responding sooner, we were away.