Questions tagged [memory]
For questions about computer memory in a retrocomputing context
43
questions
33
votes
6
answers
30k
views
Windows 98 with 2GB of RAM
I have assembled a retro-gaming PC out of an old Shuttle SN45G with a Windows 98/Windows XP dual boot.
The motherboard can handle 2GB of RAM, but apparently Windows 98 can only handle 1 GiB.
Windows ...
- 2,637
25
votes
2
answers
4k
views
Why do old computers perform a long memory test on every boot?
Basically any computers from the mid 90s and earlier perform a slow memory check on every single boot. The more memory there is present, the slower that process becomes, for example: https://www....
- 423
19
votes
3
answers
2k
views
How did the IBM PC handle multiple physical devices serving memory at the same physical address?
I'm trying to figure out how the IBM 5150 PC handled the case where multiple physical devices (memory chips) were mapped to the same address within the 8088's physical address space.
The closest I've ...
- 5,246
18
votes
4
answers
2k
views
Historical price of ROM
Historical price charts for RAM are quite readily available, e.g. in the mid-seventies a ballpark figure was a penny a byte. What was the price of ROM (assuming you were getting the chips produced in ...
- 58.4k
10
votes
3
answers
2k
views
Why are the PPU registers on the NES mirrored?
[Please see answers to this related question as well]
The NES Picture Processing Unit has eight memory-mapped registers to the CPU in registers $2000 to $2007. The are incompletely decoded, so they ...
- 9,432
5
votes
4
answers
506
views
Cheapest type of Read-Only Memory allowing Random access before Year 1970
Back in the 50s and 60s people had:
random access, read-write memories like Magnetic Cores.
sequential access, read-write memories like Delay Lines and Magnetic Tapes.
And:
sequential access, write ...
- 3,732
3
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Why did IBM 7030 or IBM 360 use byte and word addressing simultaneously
In 1950s machines had a 36 bit words. And in this word we could pack symbols using 6 bits. And to fetch this symbols from the word programmer should do it using bit manipulations.
In 1961 IBM released ...
- 649
26
votes
3
answers
11k
views
How does the Gameboy's memory bank switching work?
I'm writing a Game Boy emulator, but I don't completely understand how its memory mapping works. Here is what I (think) I know (and don't know).
The CPU can address up to 0x10000 memory locations ...
- 1,049
17
votes
9
answers
4k
views
Z80 and video chip contending for random access
Back in the 8-bit days, I used 6502 computers, where the story about memory access was easy to understand. RAM chips of the late seventies and early eighties could do 2 MHz (or a bit more e.g. 2.6 in ...
- 58.4k
15
votes
1
answer
1k
views
Under what circumstances would RAM locations 0 and 1 be written and/or read on the C64?
To be clear, I'm talking about the actual memory cells at addresses
$0000 and $0001 in the DRAM chips. Devices can of course initiate read
or write requests to these address on the address/data buses ...
- 24.6k
6
votes
2
answers
363
views
Why was the maximum byte size of 8 bits on IBM 7030?
As far as I know, IBM 7030 used term byte. But this byte was just an imaginary term to make easier for our brain to work with bits. So it had nothing in common with a physical realization of the CPU.
...
- 649
31
votes
7
answers
18k
views
How can you run a program that is bigger than RAM?
Suppose you have a program that is 218 words long. However you are using a 16 bit machine and have 216 words of RAM. (The RAM is directly addressed by the CPU). On the other hand, you have unlimited '...
- 1,985
26
votes
6
answers
3k
views
Core Memory Stability
How reliable was the ferrite ring core memory system? When the power went off, did all the magnetic positions of the iron rings in the program wire grid remain exactly as they were?
- 421
21
votes
3
answers
5k
views
What is causing the problem with the RAM in this (claimed) Spectrum 48k?
I bought what was claimed by the seller to be an Issue 4S Spectrum 48k.
I tried loading games and some worked while others didn't. Turns out it was the 16k ones that worked and 48k didn't. This ...
- 423
21
votes
10
answers
5k
views
Why did BASIC programs tend to READ a redundant copy of DATA?
Take for example this BASIC version of ELIZA which starts out (in lines 50–170) by a number of READ loops which copy DATA (lines 1340 and following) into a handful of arrays.
Isn't this rather ...
- 2,917
18
votes
5
answers
924
views
Did any computers use automatically-operated mechanical storage as electronically-read-addressable memory
From what I understand of ENIAC, it had a very large number of manually-operated rotary switches which behaved as ROM. While programming ENIAC in the early days required a plugboard, the machine was ...
- 34.6k
16
votes
6
answers
2k
views
Was photographic film ever used for digital data storage?
I was thinking about how Williams Tubes worked and how one could hypothetically "snapshot" (quite literally!) the state of a computer's memory by simply taking a photograph of the phosphor end of a ...
- 761
15
votes
6
answers
5k
views
Can a 16K computer be upgraded to 64K?
A slightly odd question, but is it possible to take an old 16K computer that wasn't designed for memory upgrades, such as a Commodore 16 or PET 4016, and upgrade it to 64K as a hardware hack?
I'm not ...
- 58.4k
12
votes
6
answers
989
views
Largest ratio between base and maximum RAM
For example, the Apple II originally shipped with a base 4K of RAM but could be expanded to 48K, so the maximum was twelve times the base.
Of all the computers ever shipped, which one has had the ...
- 58.4k
12
votes
6
answers
2k
views
Memory-limited workloads
I'm trying to figure out whether computing workloads, particularly those related to science and engineering, have historically been limited by memory or CPU. (By the former, I mean not memory access ...
- 58.4k
12
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Is all 100% of a 64k Apple II memory usable?
Are there any areas of the 64k RAM which are permanently unusable by anything, whether by the built-in monitor ROM or user programs?
Looking at $C000-C0FF, this is the "softswitch" area, and as far ...
- 3,639
11
votes
4
answers
2k
views
Could the Z80 do interference-free video as the 6502 could?
Technically this isn't just about video since it applies to any regularly
scheduled DMA¹ from a non-CPU subsystem, but video is the most common
application of this technique so I'll use that as the ...
- 24.6k
10
votes
2
answers
3k
views
When did 64K RAM become about as cheap as 16K?
In the days of 8-bit computers, two of the more common memory configurations were 16K and 64K, implemented as eight RAM chips of 16kbit or 64kbit respectively. The setup was one chip per bit over the ...
- 58.4k
10
votes
2
answers
3k
views
What's the difference between the DOS HIMEM.SYS and the Windows 3.x version?
An installation of DOS (e.g. MS-DOS 5.0) will typically include a statement in its CONFIG.SYS such as DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS.
When installing Windows 3.1, it's setup comments (REMs) that line out, ...
- 8,036
10
votes
4
answers
3k
views
How does the Apple II address more than 128KB of RAM?
For the Apple //e, it was very common to have an extended 80-column card installed which brought the machine up to 128KB of RAM via 2 banks of 64KB each. There are soft switches in the $C0xx space ...
- 15.8k
10
votes
1
answer
1k
views
What sort of RAM chips did the Commodore 64 use in 1994?
For the first few years after its release in 1982, the Commodore 64 used eight RAM chips of 64kbit each.
In the late eighties, it became cheaper to use a pair of 256kbit chips of the 4-bit-wide ...
- 58.4k
10
votes
4
answers
3k
views
How did DOS know where to load itself in upper memory?
If I remember correctly, you could ask DOS to load in upper memory by writing something like...
DOS=UMB
...somewhere in the CONFIG.SYS file.
But the question is, how did DOS know what portions of ...
- 329
9
votes
2
answers
1k
views
Unused RAM Chips on x86 machines
On classic x86 machines the upper 384 KB of system memory contains video RAM and BIOS ROM Besides other things. Those areas overlay over conventional RAM, so that you can't use all upper memory, but ...
- 1,274
9
votes
5
answers
2k
views
Largest practical motherboard for early computers
The power of a computer is often effectively determined by the size the RAM can be expanded to. In many cases, this was even more important than CPU speed: Memory-limited workloads
In the early days, ...
- 58.4k
9
votes
4
answers
995
views
Early BASIC memory management
Can anyone verify or correct my memory here?
Long ago, I had access to a Commodore PET which I think had 8kB of memory. Also slightly less long ago, I had a Commodore 64 with its "elephatine" 64kB. ...
- 2,014
8
votes
1
answer
524
views
Which Amiga systems did access RAM with fast page access?
I'm pretty sure Chip and Fast RAM access on an Amiga 1000 does not support FPM access.
Which Amiga system, chipset or motherboard "glue logic" first introduced FPM access to Fast RAM? Which one to ...
- 3,716
8
votes
4
answers
2k
views
Largest memory peripheral for Sinclair ZX81?
Back in the early to mid 1980s, I vaguely recall seeing an advert in a (I think) UK based computer periodical monthly (Your Computer, or Computer and Video Games), for a memory peripheral that offered ...
- 3,309
8
votes
2
answers
2k
views
What was the first commercially available computer with ECC memory?
In the early days of computing, memory error detection and correction was either non-existent (Wikipedia tells of Seymour Cray famously saying "parity is for farmers" when asked why he left it out of ...
- 18.3k
8
votes
2
answers
622
views
Could the Apple IIGS play any and all Amiga MOD files?
The Apple IIGS has a wavetable synthesis sound chip with dedicated 64 kilobytes of RAM.
I assume the sound architecture dictates that samples have to be loaded into that dedicated RAM to be able to be ...
- 1,109
6
votes
3
answers
1k
views
Allocate 64 KiB in Watcom C 16-bit DOS
I'm trying to allocate a 64 KiB buffer in Watcom C 16-bit DOS. I'm using the "compact" memory model which defines the code segment to be limited to 64 KiB and addressed by near pointers (...
- 271
6
votes
2
answers
271
views
Can fast page mode depend on the first data retrieved?
As early as the seventies, some computers used RAM in page mode, in which you can read two or more words from sequential locations in rapid succession by only supplying the column address once, and ...
- 58.4k
6
votes
3
answers
1k
views
Does the 8080 always handle unaligned access correctly?
The 8080 is referred to as an 8-bit CPU because it has an 8-bit data bus, but there are a number of cases where it must perform 16-bit memory access, for example when reading or writing a 16-bit ...
- 58.4k
5
votes
1
answer
1k
views
MS DOS 6.22 hangs on modern hardware after loading HIMEM.SYS
I am trying to run MS-DOS 6.22 on modern hardware. I successfully created bootable flash disk with MS-DOS 6.22. But when it starts with HIMEM.SYS enabled in CONFIG.SYS it hangs. Searching Internet the ...
- 183
5
votes
4
answers
3k
views
How does memory addressing/mapping work in 8-bit systems?
If I attach a 16 KIB EEPROM to a 6502 or similar, and put some kind of operating system on it, it will run fine, but won't have access to any other chips. So, when a Commodore VIC20 had 5k of ram and ...
- 51
5
votes
2
answers
1k
views
How fast was Rambus compared to regular EDO RAM?
The Nintendo 64 used Rambus RDRAM. This was an unusual choice, e.g. the PlayStation used regular EDO RAM which I gather most consoles and computers did at the time.
As I understand it, Nintendo chose ...
- 58.4k
5
votes
2
answers
492
views
How many 6SN7 tubes did it take to store a bit?
One of the most important components of a computer is a circuit called a flip-flop, which has two stable states (that it can flip-flop between, hence the name); it is used for temporary storage of a ...
- 58.4k
5
votes
1
answer
673
views
Cost differential between 2 and 4 MHz RAM chips in 1982
The most common speed of the 6502 was 1 MHz, allowing the use of 2 MHz RAM chips (half the bandwidth went to the video chip to refresh the screen).
In 1982, the BBC Micro shipped, with double speeds ...
- 58.4k
4
votes
1
answer
257
views
How long would a 41256 take to do 4 accesses in fast page mode?
I have been surprised at how little use eighties computers made of fast page mode access to RAM. (A notable exception being the Sinclair Spectrum, which used it to get the necessary bandwidth to video ...
- 58.4k