Lets build a 8MB Fast Ram Expansion for the Amiga 500  

This channel is turning out to be an excellent DIY guide for us Amiga enthusiasts! Keep up the great work!

i think you did a great job on the soldering.

Great work on the soldering. Two points: 1. I think you did things in the right order; access to the pins on your fine pitch surface-mount ICs is more important than access to the much larger terminals of your passives, so I always populate the ICs first and then the passives around them. Reversing this makes "drag" soldering along the chips difficult if there are any small components nearby already in place. 2. My usual strategy for hand-soldering two terminal surface mount passives is to pre-tin a blob of solder on only ONE of the two pads. You can then hold the component with your tweezers and slide it in from the other side while heating the tinned pad with your iron, and reposition/adjust as needed. Once the first terminal is soldered in, it's easy to go back and solder the second one, and then subsequently touch up the first one if needed.

Excellent job =D Good idea with the socket, but the pins are a bit short that way =/ I prefer to go with the separate key switch pins there. Great project by LIV2 - love this board!

Hi. I used to solder prototype surface mount boards as part of my job, and A tip I can give you is. Maybe try a solder paste and one with the flux in it. Clean the board, Put lines of the paste on the board across the rows of contacts. Then place the component onto the paste it should hold it place for you. Then tin your soldering iron, clean it and then touch the end pins (closest to the corners). Once happy the component is in the right place, run your iron down the component above the lines of paste. Best of luck, hope you find this useful.

Thanks for sharing the issues that you run into while doing your projects. It's valuable information!

You made that look easy. Nice job on using the thru-hole in place of the surface-mount. Someone did that on my Amiga 600 motherboard with one of the caps and it looks pretty solid on there.

Great job putting this together! One hint about the slow ram in sysinfo: the fast memory had a priority of 0, same as slow memory. This should be something (much) higher, otherwise system will be unable to tell the difference and load programs and libraries "wherever". This is hopefully easy to fix in FPGA, just reach out to Liv2 and let them know!

Just found your channel. Great video. Always wanted to learn to solder, you made that look easy. You've inspired me to just give it a go. Great room setup by the way too. Big Amiga fan myself having just last week finally getting myself an A1200. Liked and subscribed!

Well done, the satisfaction of getting something you've built yourself working is hard to beat, I've yet to tackle smd tho

Awesome job! That is a neat kit. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to checking out your other videos.

Cool! Things we dreamed of in the 80s...

You absolutely made that look easy, great job!

Nice job! Amazing!

Nice job! You did as good a job on U5 as possible under given the conditions. Subscribed.

Great video! It's nice to see someone on RU-vid who is a not an expert in soldering and has genuine worries like the rest of us. I still can't get my head around how you do those small legs on the chips though. It seems to defy the laws of physics that you don't get the solder touching several pins at once.

You MUST convert that SLOW RAM to CHIP RAM, trust me when I say this is what you need, specially because it will basically give your Denise and Paula more RAM to work with directly.

Kickstart 1.3 had a utility to use fast ram first if I remember correctly. Think that was fixed in kickstart 2.04. There’s a mod you can do to make that slow RAM become chip ram which is more useful. Think it depends on if your Angus supports it though.

Well Done ! I could never have done that.

if only these were around in the day... enough ram to run a few rebootable ramdrives with plenty to spare.... the issue you had with slow ram being used first you may want to run 'fastmemfirst' which resides in the system folder on a standard 1.3 workbench or run it in your s/startup-sequence will fix it for you - another option is to go for 1MB chip with an 8372A, but with that much ram I would mount several RAD:'s and diskcopy whatever disks you wanted into them and reboot and enjoy high speed loading at fast ram speed

I guess the cup of coffee is the most important tool :)

4:06 Never too much flux ;-)

Thanks for this awesome video. Great job. What kind of flux are you using?

Great video! I know you've probably been asked a ton of times, but what soldering iron and solder extractor do you use? Mine is awful and I ruined an Ikea Air Quality device yesterday because my shakey hands was waiting for the iron to meld the solder into the wires.

Nice work bud. That's the most animated I've ever seen you :) Do you have a bunch of crap electronics hanging about? If so you'd think you should be able to pillage some of those regulators from one of them.

Now it would be cool if you could make the 512kB fake-fast be a 512kB chipmem upgrade instead. Maybe this is possible by messing with the solder-jumpers? I think I recall doing this at some point.

Please make some movie with complete programming instruction for this CPLD. Thanks! :)

The Ian Malcom “must go faster edition”?

Do you know if this is compatible with a570 cd-rom ? Nice Video

I use kapton to cover all the threw holes till I am done with the surface mount since it is hard to get the threw holes clean.

I remember shelling out £100 on a 512kb RAM expansion for my old A500, think it's still floating about somewhere. Dread to think what something like this would have cost back in the day.

I would have AMS1117 3.3V available. But these are SOT-223! If this would be of any help, let me know.

Very nice! Couple of questions: - What was the "official" way of adding Fast RAM to A500 back in the days? My limited understanding is that trap-door expansion adds Slow RAM. - Where is the Dread demo on A500 with this RAM expansion? :)

What's with the scratch on the agnus? I'm just messing with you I know you were bothered by it in the other video. Not a big deal when you get that 8372 in there. Nice guide this is something I'll do with my A2000.

Lavoro eccellente

The amiga mini is coming out soon. Any interest in that device?

Where do you get the 68k socket, thanks?

Hi where to get the kit from

I built a couple PiStorm boards recently, my first go at SMD. Had a few hiccups but got both running. SMDs are not toooo bad, at least the parts you can see the legs of.

The only thing that I'm left wondering about is if my chip ram and slow ram are dead, would my A500 even come to life if I had the gottagofastram installed?

Would the gotta go fast work woth the open source 14 mhz accelerator you build as well?

I'm wondering how does sysinfo figure out how much RAM there is?

TF536 is a great accelerator to build.

So what are you doing with 8mb of ram with this machine? What software use this expansion of ram? Thx.

I know this is probably in some office, but it feels like it is in the back of a truck.

really the design should be changed to use a sot23-5 LDO regulator. that package type is significantly more poplar and would have had a much easier time finding a drop-in replacement from any other manufacturer.

u not install pi 4 HDMI ????

Are you ready for building TF536?

As I recall it you can use the slow ram as extra chip ram by soldering some wires. However it may break compatibility in some software, so back in the days I had a switch to swap ram configuration when needed.

Always drink the coffee first, then put on your loupes (I use Amazon)

26:13 Oooh, terrible ideas! Tell us more. 🙂

Just to make it VERY complicated they won't give you proper SVF files. The repository contains JED files that you must use with their cheap and cryptic programmer. Fortunately, there is iMPACT to the rescue and can convert these to proper files you can use on a decent programmer.

"Terrible" ideas?😉 LOL... But more seriously, you should just mod that A500 so that the Slow RAM becomes Chip RAM.

It is no wonder Amiga's are getting so expensive. People keep hording them by the dozen.

Can I ask you or the people in the comments WHY almost every single Amiga upgrade is crippled like this? As far as I know there's no limit to 4 or 8MB for the A500 in terms of RAM addressing. Yet you and many others making choose DIY to add only 4 or 8MB of ram instead of using 16 or even 64MB. The same annoying problem is with the TerribleFire 534 that only has 4MB of RAM instead of 16 or 64 like the 536. These RAM chips are the same DRAM used in old graphics cards and they are still produced. So what is the problem of soldering a 16MB chip? The price difference is very small. I am considering to desolder the RAM from the TF534 and replace it with 4X16 MB chips, and avoid using this RAM addon that you are making completely. I found it online in many stores and then found your video of making it from the GIT schematics. But it would be more elegant to use less extra hardware like a sandwich inside the Amiga if we can avoid it.

Una calculadora de bolsillo tiene más capacidad jajaja 🤣😂

The only thing I'd recommend is moving the mic away from your nose. When you're close up, all I hear is you're stuffy nose just whistling away. 😭