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Everex RAM 8000 (EV-178) - ISA ram upgrade card - Help please!

uscleo

Member
Joined
Oct 30, 2018
Messages
28
Location
Hong Kong
Hi There - I just got my hands on a NOS Everex RAM 8000 EV-178 ISA ram expansion board (it's in great condition, I'm guessing it's never been used at all) and I have a few questions (please bear with me as I'm new to the technical side of vintage computing)

I bought this with the hope that I would be able to use it in a Compaq portable III and also a Compaq Portable 386 - both have 16bit ISA expansion slots.

The only trouble is that the board is blank and not populated - and the instruction guide does not give much info about populating the board, specifically, it doesn't have much detail on the chips needed. Any idea on which chips I would need? Looking online, scans of old computer magazines state that I would need "1mb SDRAM 100ns" - but since I will be hunting on ebay for the chips I need something more specific.

To make matters worse, the kit came with a 5.25 floppy that is not reading properly. I got it to load and display the directory, but trying to do anything more gave a disk error. I tired using a floppy disk recovery utility and it couldn't get even 1 file off the disk - do I need it to add ram to my system? If so, any recommendations on floppy recovery services?

Both my Portable 386 and Portable III have compaq's proprietary ram expansion cards - the portable III's is at 16 bit and the 386 at 32 bit, not sure if that matters.

I also found an older post about this card, (http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-34252.html) but looks like in that case the card was used and needed to clear out the EEPROM - mine is likely at the factory default setting.

Any advice, ideas, comments would be appreciated!
 
Just from the name I'm guessing this card has 8 rows of 9 sockets, where each row would hold 1MB RAM using 9 1Mbit DIP DRAMs. That's DRAM with no S.
 
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