Showing posts with label upgrade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label upgrade. Show all posts

Monday, September 23, 2019

Enhancement : Upgrading my C128's VRAM from 16K to 64K

I've know for a while that it was possible to upgrade my C128's VRAM from 16K to 64K of RAM.  I'd recently pulled it apart to make sure the caps were all still okay so I took the opportunity to give the upgrade a go.  Also I'd acquired quite a few ram chips for C64C repairs.

Ray Carlson has an article here on it :
http://personalpages.tds.net/%7Ercarlsen/cbm/c128/RGB%20V-RAM/64kvram.txt

I had seen the easy upgrade option using a daughter board.  I wasn't really happy about not being able to put the cover back on the graphics chips properly with that method.  With my new found de-soldering skill I just decided to remove the old chips and put in some sockets.


. . . and well the result . . . I wasn't really expecting any difference for the most part.  My C128 started, I tested it using Ray's test code.  I loaded and ran a demo that used it which for the most part worked however my Commodore Monitor did have some issues with some of the tested resolutions.  I even ran GEOS with the 3.3 Mega patch.  That's pretty much it.  Well if I need my chips back at least I can swap back in the old 8K chips in to the nice new sockets.