Last night, I got the boards for the memory expansion module for the Prophet 3000. I built a couple up and they work! All four banks check out in both the Voice chip and DMA chip tests. One of my P3000’s (the rev B, with the I-627B already installed) is having issues with bank 4 when tested with the DMA chip. The Rev B unit had the RAS signals switched around so that you could get two banks of memory without needing the upgrade board, the downside being all of the track cutting and jumpers. The rev A unit (which most P3000’s are) is working flawlessly with both the I-627B daughterboard and the memory expansion board. It works fine with the 3.0B OS, not so much with the WCP1.6A OS. So, there’s a bit of a catch-22: If you upgrade to the I-627B and 8 Meg, you may not be able to use SCSI, but if you stay with the I-627A, you can’t expand the memory. Once more testing has been done, I’ll contact Wine Country and see if they can modify the OS to work with both SCSI and the I-627B. The existing SCSI implementation is pretty limited, as far as I can gather: You can’t actually format the drive on the P3000, it has to be pre-formatted on a Mac with OS 7.x (who even has one of those these days??). The actual problem with WCP1.6A is with loading some floppy disks, so maybe SCSI will work – once I can get a properly formatted drive.

Pictures to follow….

I just got the boards back from PCBcart for the I-627 transition board. I’ve built one prototype, and will test it this weekend.

The website has moved to a new host, so there may be some interruptions over the next few days as I sort things out.

UPDATE: Things appear to be working OK now.

UPDATE 2: The adapter works perfectly!! However, I still have to test it with the expanded RAM module which is still a few weeks away. Currently I only have 1 bank of memory installed.