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RAM Test Program for 808x?

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Raven

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I have a Zenith Z-140 which I diagnosed as having some RAM trouble. It has soldered-on RAM so I decided I couldn't do anything about it and stuck it in the corner. After a few more years of toying with old machines (that was my first 808x system) I've decided that I should be able to diagnose it more accurately if I had some software to do so with. I had diagnosed it by noticing that some stuff didn't work right, and if I ran a PC booter game (Pirates, to be specific) it stopped loading and froze whenever the title image filled the screen about 2/3 through, leading me to think there must be a corruption or hole in the RAM someplace.

Anywho if anyone knows a tool I can use to diagnose this it would be appreciated.
 
Norton Diags runs though ram tests as well. Tries 1s, 0s, walking patterns, etc. I can't say I've ever actually had any bad ram on a PC, or at least ever diaganosed any, but I've run the tests a few times on various machines.

You can search for dos "burn-in" testers as well, as they are likely to have ram tests.

Good luck.
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Trevor
 
Amidiag does partity test, pattern test, walking 1's, walking 0's, address test, refresh test, and more. It's proprietary but does a lot of stuff.
 
Stupid question but the Z-140 doesn't have a built-in diag does it? The Z-15(0/1?) does if you do ctrl+alt+insert and for me had a great memory testing app where it told me which chip it would be with the u-schematic number. Pretty nifty though I know that's a newer model than yours.
 
It has some tools, but I don't believe there's a RAM tester. I can view registers, dump memory, spam the screen with colors, and a few other neat things, but I don't remember how to open that menu any longer - I'd need to check the manual (yes I have a manual xD).

FYI Jorg, Checkit won't fit on a 360K disk, even tho it's 349K ("352 on disk")...

Hoho... you're right barythrin, it does have a memory test in there.
 
Last edited:
Raven said:
FYI Jorg, Checkit won't fit on a 360K disk, even tho it's 349K ("352 on disk")...
Click to expand...

Ole Juul said:
Too bad. Checkit seems like it's a good one here. Perhaps you could temporarily stick in a 720K drive.
Click to expand...

In times like that, pkLite might be of some use, in exchange for slightly slower load time. When trying to fit my diags on various size media, I've found executable compressors very handy many times, on all kinds of platforms.
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Trevor
 
Ole Juul said:
Too bad. Checkit seems like it's a good one here. Perhaps you could temporarily stick in a 720K drive.
Click to expand...

Nothing but 360K 5.25" floppies work in the Zenith Z-140, as far as I've tried. I may be able to get a backpack drive running, if they like the Zenith more then they liked the Sr. Partner yesterday.
 
Raven said:
Checkit won't fit on a 360K disk, even tho it's 349K ("352 on disk")...
Click to expand...
I used Checkit 3.0 from a 360KB floppy many times, the trick is:
- put checkit.exe onto first diskette
- put everything else necessary (checkit.cnf, checkit.hlp, checkit.ovl) onto second diskette
Then it simply prompts when disk change is necessary...
 
This is an empty disk I'm talking about here, just the exe. Maybe it's saving unformat information and that's where I went wrong - I'll try it again in a day or two.
 
Sorry to resurrect an ancient thread, but I discovered more info on running CHECKIT on a 5.25 system.

If you have two 5.25 drives, place the diskette with checkit.exe and checkit.cnf in drive B:
Place the diskette with the other files, checkit.hlp, checkit.ovl, checkit.cnf in drive A:

From the DOS prompt Switch to B:
run 'checkit.exe'
no more prompts to switch diskettes...... it now reads the ovl file from A:
 
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