A shrine for Chip Level Designs »RAMBOard« hardware series

A documentation of a popular hardware extension for the Commodore homecomputer floppy disk drives for the C64 and C128 computer.

What's a RAMBOard

Chip Level Design's (CLD) RAMBOards were mostly used for specialised backup tools. Many original game disks were protected by a floppy disk copy protection system, that can only be copied with a full track nibbler (beside sector oriented nibblers). Because an original 1541 Commodore floppy disk drive doesn't contain enough internal RAM, it had to be equipped with additional RAM to let such a full track nibbler work.

Probably the most popular RAMBOard copy tools were the products »Renegade«, »Maverick« and the software of Utilities Unlimited »Super-Card« series since the RAMBOard was built in a compatible way.

Another use of such a RAMBOard is to speed up the transfer rate of the Commodore disk drives by using the additional RAM as a track cache. Hardware floppy speeders of the second and third generation always used additional RAM beside other hardware extensions for that purpose.

Enjoy this site

Over time this documentary page grew more and more and got divided into subsections after a couple of additions in 2006. Navigate with the top selector through the sections partly described here in short:

History

A short review of the roots of this web site in appropriate newsgroup discussions and the history of when which items were discussed and got added to the page

1541-II RAMBOard

The description of the most recent revision of CLDs RAMBOard, designed for the Commodore 1541-II and 1541C disk drive model. This subsection contains a detailed discussion of the hardware, because this revision was the very first one that got documented over here. When the documentation of the board started no installation manual was available and it was needed to find out where the three additional wires need connected to.

1571 RAMBOard and other hardware versions

The 1571 RAMBoard could be documented as a complete package, a contributor provided scans of the hardware and the installation instructions. He helped revealing hidden PCB traces and found many errors in the digitally reproduced manual. It was the first fully digitally preserved artifact from Chip Level Designs.

References

This page has got some references to external resources that are related to CLD, their RAMBOard and other hardware as well as to their competitor Utilities Unlimited and their products.