4400/7220/Tanzania Clone VRAM

After tracing out the boards the old nemesis Buried Traces has appeared.

The data and address busses are obvious, as are most of the support pins, but there's a bunch of signals I can't be certain of as I'm fairly sure they're repurposed from the EDO use.

These are the RAS and CAS lines, there are two RAS and 8 CAS lines, but an SGRAM implementation only has four chips, with two active at a time. However SGRAM has four extra lines for mask operations so I think these might be used for that instead, but it's not in Apple's documentation and I can't find any pinouts for the ATI Mach 64 VT series of chips.

So if someone with a bit of time and a multimeter could find where these pins connect to on the chips that would be amazing. I'm not fussed about format. On the SGRAM chips pin 1 is the leftmost pin on the bottom as aligned with the text and counted anticlockwise, but just drawing the connections is fine.

I'm grouping these in connector order - pin 69 should be on the back pin side of 9.

9. VOE0 - This should be the clock line, and it might be connected via a pull up resistor to pin 60 (TermPwr).
69. VOE1 - I suspect this is Clock Enable on SGRAM.

10. VWE0 - Write enable, this should be connected to two of the chips.
79. VWE1 - Write enable on the other two chips?

12. VRAS0 - This should be RAS on two of the chips.
72. VRAS1 - Should be RAS on the other two chips.

13, 73, 14, 74, 15, 75, 17 and 77 - VCAS0-7. I think two of these will be used as CAS for the SGRAM and four of them as mask data for bulk operations.

Unfortunately unless I can find one of these rare modules or memory bus documentation for the Mach64 VT2 I can't be sure of the routing. I find any instances of the VT2 on a discrete card using SGRAM, though the VT4 did have one card. The documentation I can find suggests these chipsets have the same pinout but I can't find any actual documentation on this.
 
If it's an ATI part, could it be interchangeable with their other stuff from around that time? They used to have cards that could be upgraded. At least the chips look the same.
 

Attachments

  • ATIvram.jpg
    ATIvram.jpg
    260.3 KB · Views: 6
  • ATIvram2.jpg
    ATIvram2.jpg
    451.1 KB · Views: 6
  • ATIvram3.png
    ATIvram3.png
    2.1 MB · Views: 6
If it's an ATI part, could it be interchangeable with their other stuff from around that time? They used to have cards that could be upgraded. At least the chips look the same.
It’s a standard ATI Mach64 VT/264VT2 chip but the memory module is custom. The only available documentation from Apple doesn’t have the full pinout for using sgram and I can’t find hardware documentation for the Mach64 VT line. From what I can see there was only one PCI card with a Mach64 VT with SGRAM released but I’d need to trace out the signal lines to the chip.

Based on what I’ve been able to find I have almost every line accounted for, so I’m working on a prototype board with my best guess. Worst case results in a lot of bodge wires.
 
Back
Top