BigRam Plus is made by Individual Computers and only works in Zorro 3 based Amiga systems, ie. Amiga 3000(T) and Amiga 4000(T).
What surprised me about the card was the size of it! It was much bigger than I expected!
The rear of the card is blank, which as it turned out was just as well!
I opened up the Amiga 4000T to install it:
I have covered the details of my Amiga 4000T in previous posts, but it is quite loaded up!
It has a Cyberstorm 060 installed, with 96MB memory, plus 16MB on board memory too. There is 2 SCSI CDROM drives and one IDE CDROM drive installed, along with a Mediator PCI bridge board.
The system has an Indivision AGA mk2, Picasso IV Zorro card and Voodoo3 PCI graphics cards installed. A little bit overkill perhaps on the graphics front - the Picasso IV probably does not need to be there anymore - normally it sits in the A4000D but I had it in the A4000T while comparing Indivision AGA Mk2 output to it a while back and never took it out..
Continuing on the PCI side of things, a SB128 sound card (mixed with the Paula output), and RTL8029 PCI network card.
On the Zorro side is a Buddha IDE controller card with a 127GB IDE Hard disk and IDE to SDCard converter with an SD card booting AmiKit Real, and finally a Deneb USB card as well!
The case is very full, and I knew I only had one free Zorro slot left in it.
And here it is, squished between the PCI cards, Buddha and Picasso IV card...
Definitely a challenging installation but I gave it a go and it just fitted in the space available. And I mean just! You can see the mm clearance to the PCI network card, Voodoo3 PCI card and the Zorro buddha card underneath!
Anyway, it fits, so I put it all back together and fired it up - pleased to say the memory worked straight away and now the system has 368MB Fast memory available! :-)
ShowConfig shows the new memory installed, along with the other boards!
A couple of demos were a bit unhappy with the amount of Fast memory I used to have, but not any more!
Being a weekday I don't have time to probe too much, but it is great that it works!
I took the opportunity to enjoy Focus Design's latest demo effort released in September - great AGA demo:
Now I have to think of some programs that can make use of the extra memory!
Why do you have 3 CD drives? Two, I can see would be useful for directly copying CDs, but why 3?
ReplyDeleteI guess the third one is to also listen to CD while making copies?
DeleteLove this card, in fact I just got a second one in from AmigaKit the other day for my 4000D project, but I am tempted to put it in my 4000T as well and have two in it! lol.... Overkill I know.
ReplyDeleteDoes that work? 512MB fast ram in Zorro on an A4000T?
DeleteIt's still hard to see on your pictures, but do I understand correctly with some effort you can use both zorro slot with BigRAMPlus and PCI with PCI card (e.g. SB or ethernet) in the same row? I thought the igRAMPlus would block the PCI slot of the same row.
ReplyDelete