VOGONS


First post, by nathanieltolbert

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Hello everyone. My apologies to bother again, but I picked up a CL-GD5428 VLB card off of eBay for a build of a computer that I plan to give away on my retro streams online and it's the Pine PT 524/8G video card with the 28 variant chip. It has one Megabyte of ram soldered to the board which is 256Kx16. The chips are MT4C16257DJ-7. Looking up the information shows it to be 70ns DRAM which means the additional chips to add will need to be DRAM, but I don't know which ones to get. I can identify that the sockets are 20 pin DIP sockets, and the total amount needs to be 128KB per RAM IC, but should I be looking at 256kx4 DRAM ICs, or 128x8 DRAM ICs, or 64x16 (If that even exists) DRAM ICs? I looked up the card and I found lots of information but I didn't see anything specific to the type of DRAM, just that it could be FPM or VRAM. And I'm guessing that since it's DRAM and not VRAM, that it's FPM. But I could be 100% wrong of course. If anyone can help me I would be super appreciative. I would like to install the extra 1MB of RAM. I don't know if it will help with memory speeds, but I know with a couple of their later cards the RAM bandwidth increased after installing the extra Megabyte. Thank you for looking and helping.

Warm Regards,

Nathan

Reply 1 of 3, by mkarcher

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You are spot on with suspecting 256k x 4, 128k x 8 or 64k x 16 (all of it is one megabit). Only 256k x 4 exists in DIP20, so that's the way to go. Also, you are right that you don't need VRAM (and again, you won't find 256k x 4 VRAM in DIP-20). As I understand it, page mode cycles need to be supported, but basically all 256k x 4 DIP20 chips you can find are FPM. So just get any 256k x 4 RAM chip that fits the socket and has 60 or 70 ns access time.

Reply 2 of 3, by nathanieltolbert

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Thank you for the information and the reply. I appreciate it. I will get on that and I will report back if it increases the memory transfer speed? I don't know if this card has bank interleaving, or what that term is.

Reply 3 of 3, by mkarcher

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The cirrus cards do not get faster with the second megabyte equipped. You get more offscreen memory for accelerated drawing, and the card will have enough memory for 1280*1024 with 256 colors and 1024*768 with 65536 colors. In both cases, the Cirrus chip is too slow to show these modes at 60 Hz, so they are only provided as interlaced modes at 43.5 frames per second / 87 fields per second.