Strange Card, guessing this is the place for it?

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'm accustomed to playing "what's this card?" elsewhere in the forums, but never about something like this one.
but I'm curious about this pic I found on 'fritter.



From the looks of it I guessed Apple II somethingorother:

Found a couple of blurbs that may be applicable here:
https://archive.org/stream/TheAppleIIGSBuyersGuideSummer1989/TheAppleIIGSBuyersGuideSummer1989_djvu.txt

_________________________________________________________

Hardware/software system that transforms standard IIGS
memory boards into instant-access ROM disks
Apple IIGS; compatible memory card.
$149.95 retail

Checkmate Technology, Inc.; 509 S. Rockford Dr;
Tempe, AZ 85281; 602-966-5802 or 800-325-7347


_________________________________________________________

Our test system was a preproduction board
njnning in a 2.75 MB Apple IIGS. The memory
included 1.5 MB on an Applied Engineering
GS-RAM board and another 1 MB on a Check-
mate MultiRam GS board. The two memory
boards were attached to a Checkmate Memory-
Saver, which manages the two boards as one
block of memory and allows the use of part of
this memory as a ROM Disk.

The TransWarp GS took all this hardware
in stride, and operations from anywhere in
memor\' — /ROM, /RAM5 or system RAM —
were all accelerated with no difficulty.



_________________________________________________________

What the heck is this medusa lookin' thing? Looks like you plug a memory card into it and it feeds SIMM slots, does it do the reverse or what?

edit: needed to attach the pic. Liniking worked in preview, but disappeared from post. bug?

 

[Gorgonops]

That's actually a picture of the Mac version of the product. Applefritter thread with pictures here:

http://www.applefritter.com/content/macsaver-mac-memory-saver-and-guardcard

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Aha! THX, eudi, that makes a world of sense now.

What doesn't is that it looks like it must have been sold with a pair of 2MB SIMMs on board in the security device role. Limitation to single pair of 1MB SIMMS in an SE board makes no sense to me at all. That's definitely an an SE PDS card, which would explain the pair of 16bit banks and a "saved" pair of 2MB SIMMs? Would incompatible 2MB SIMMs have been available on the cheap/relatively inexpensive as compared to a pair of 1MB SIMMs in that time frame? PDS connection would be how the circuitry lockout in hardware was done?

At the angle the pic was taken, the oddly lit EuroDIN looked like it was an Apple II edge card connector to me, which is why I posted in here.

But what really struck me was the configuration of SIMM dummies on ribbon cables. Swap RA header pins across the top of thase and they'd be EXACTLY what I've spec'd as riser interface for my 72pin SIMMspender adapter/replacements for 32bit Banks.  []

edit: belay the 2MB SIMM WAGgage. I thought the pics had been lost because they and the formatting of the 'fritter page took forever to load. :

p.s. under 6.0.8 a 2MB limitation wasn't really all that negligible for an SE. I went straight to 4MB on my SE CAD/CAM workstation, but I was crazy back then.

 

[Gorgonops]

What doesn't is that it looks like it must have been sold with a pair of 2MB SIMMs on board in the security device role. Limitation to single pair of 1MB SIMMS in an SE board makes no sense to me at all.

Why do you think it was limited to a pair of SIMMs? It looks to me like there are two rows of pins for a total of four SIMM sockets on the other side of the board, and the text specifically talks about how the product needed to be able to accommodate whatever SIMMs a customer might already have on hand, since asking them to throw out their previous investment in an expensive 4MB upgrade would definitely have sunk whatever chances they might have had to sell it.

PDS connection would be how the circuitry lockout in hardware was done?

The text talks about how the security function was (initially) sort of an afterthought. The main point of this product was to supply power and refresh signals to your RAM when the power was off to allow persistent RAM disks/slash/"instant on" desktops. The PDS connection was undoubtedly to supply circuitry/firmware that would override the normal power-on startup procedure. It's certainly an interesting widget; I'm particularly curious what it used the 16k of static SRAM onboard for. (Maybe when the board was set up it soft-loaded its "firmware" into it instead of using a ROM? Maybe it stored the security keys?)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

You got me there, just looked at the pic at high magnification. 10mil spacing for SIMMs! That's a new one. I've seen flat single SIM sockets in quite a few applications. Did someone make flat or T config double SIMM sockets?



Strange there aren't enough traces fisible to sheck if they flipped one pair of sockets 180 around degrees around to abut the other pair, but that's crazy. The oddball 84-pin VRAM upgrade SIMM for my Radius Color Pivot LC could be rotated like that, but that'd be crazier yet!

 

[Gorgonops]

I was thinking the spacing looked awfully tight myself, but there are enough pins there. I'd love to see the other side. I wonder if they used some kind of crazy double-socket? I have really vague memories of once seeing such a thing. (As I recall it had a single plastic guide for two SIMMs; it held the two at different angles, one almost flat and the other at a taller angle.)