CompuServe Messages

Bob; The OS does warn you that one (or more) of the banks is bad. If a bank is bad then the title bar of the workbench will not show the memory as being present. The Ami software (firmware) appears not to necessarily "lock" you into any particular memory configuration system. The power up memory check is really intended to determine the amount of memory in the machine and perform a memory diagnostic. When Ami "runs off the end of memory" she gets an error in the verification. As far as the software is concerned, when it hits a bad region of memory it has run off the end. The machine really does not know the difference between the bad chip and a floating bus at this point. The machine holds four banks of 4 meg chips. Roughly, each nibble (4 bits) of memory from each of the 4 meg blocks are in the same location on the MB (thus the data lines for each group of four chips are wired together and the corresponding socket in each group has its "chip select" wired to the same line that is unique to that group). The whole thing is a matter of efficient circuit board trace layout and C= way of doing it is quite typical. This has nothing to do with heating. That does bring up the issue that if any one chip is in the wrong socket then the memory will also not function. -bill