First post, by Thermalwrong
I have been slightly obsessed with the AWE64 recently, even going so far as to buy a SIMMCONN-revival for my AWE64 gold - only to discover that there is definitely something wrong with my AWE64 gold, it can't see any memory fitted.
So I got hold of a CT4500 and can't use the SIMMCONN-revival with it yet because it has the Gold firmware (I think?) but the memory detected, confirming my fears that it wasn't a PC issue causing the memory on the CT4390 not to read.
This card has 512KB of sample memory, provided by this 256kx16 5v 60ns EDO memory chip.
I spotted this while I was hunting for another card to test and it got me thinking, perhaps I could do similar with mine - I'd just bought a lot of 72-pin SIMMs, with these ones here being the best choice, given that they've got 1024kx16 5v 60ns EDO chips:
The pinouts of the DRAM chips are a little different though, the original chip is a 40-pin and the DRAM chip I wanted to use is 42-pin, which appears to be more common, or the extra bus pins are necessitated by the larger address space.
Here's how it looks normally:
http://www.amoretro.de/2011/04/creative-sound … e64-ct4500.html
The pins at the bottom here are unpopulated, these are the VCC (pin 21) and GND (pin 22) on a 42-pin DRAM chip, which are pin 20 & 21 on the original 40-pin DRAM chip.
It looks like Creative designed the board to fit both types of DRAM, using the 0 ohm link resistors at R1/R2 and R8/R9 to swap between the A3/A4 address bus pins and VCC/GND on the pins that the original 512KB chip ends at.
Simply moving the resistors from their original R2 & R9 positions to R1 & R8 ensures that VCC isn't going into the address pins:
And now the AWE control utility and the CTCM diagnose can successfully use the 2MB sample RAM 😀