AST Rampage memory cards

[Unknown_K]

I won a couple AST Rampage cards today (8 bit for XT and 16 bit for 286 both full of RAM) and was wondering if anybody else bothers with expanded memory cards? I did snag a Rampage 286 with SIMM slots before and that is in a nice 286 system.

Havn't tried Desqview yet with a RAM card, how well does it work?

 

[joekster]

Ahh you were the one that outbid me...
Its cool to play with ems on 8088's...
Pkunzip, smartdrive, and win3.0 supports ems.
I've got an older ast board - only supports ems v3 (not 4). Win3.0 doesn't work with it...

 

[per]

The AST Rampage 286 Plus was actually one of the most advanced EMS 4.0 boards when that standard was introduced. It has 32 register sets and fully supports backfilling, so it should work very well with Desqview.

 

[Anonymous Coward]

Rampage for XTs is a nice card, especially when used with QRAM. This is because the rampage allows mapping memory into the B region, which is partially (but not often fully) used by graphics adapters.

 

[evildragon]

I wonder, if I use an EMS card like that on my Model 25, wouldn't that slow the 8086 down? 8-bit memory vs the native 16-bit memory? Or am I misunderstanding how the 8086 addresses memory.

 

[Unknown_K]

Kind of funny how many chips those cards used just to get 2MB of RAM, hope they all work or troubleshooting will be a pain.

I assume on an XT those 8 bit cards are not that much slower then main ram on the board.

 

[per]

Kind of funny how many chips those cards used just to get 2MB of RAM, hope they all work or troubleshooting will be a pain.

I assume on an XT those 8 bit cards are not that much slower then main ram on the board.

Relax! The drivers will problably tell which chip needs to be replaced if one is faulty.

In an XT, the main bottleneck is not the RAM speed, but the time the CPU uses to fetch data from it. It uses 4 or 5 cycles, which is close to a microsecond, to fetch a single byte of memory, and then it has to fetch instructions and other data all the time too... A 4.77MHz XT can at most move data at just beyond 300KB/s using the CPU.

 

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder, if I use an EMS card like that on my Model 25, wouldn't that slow the 8086 down? 8-bit memory vs the native 16-bit memory? Or am I misunderstanding how the 8086 addresses memory.

Yes, it would be slower, but only when accessing UMB and EMS memory. I have an EMS card in a 10MHz V30 with 16-bit planar memory, and I don't feel the card is "slowing" me down.

 

[Unknown_K]

Cards came in, also got an original Desqview 1.02 (ast edition) to try out when I get to it.

P.S. The label on the floppy came unstuck, any simple way to stick it back on without using something that will screw up the disk plastics?