Monthly Archives: April 2019

The NeoRAM Remix

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A quick market survey on RAM expansions for the C64

The Commodore 64 features a whopping 64kB of RAM, hence its name. Most of this is actually usable at least when programming in assembler. While this used to be quite a lot when compared to competitors in the market, even back in the day there were different external RAM extensions. Some of the popular “freezer” cartridges like later versions of the Action Replay or the Super Snapshot feature some additional RAM of their own.

Commodore 1764 REU. (photo by T. Conté)

Commodore started selling their RAM Expansion Units (REU) in 1985 when the C128 came out. The REU was actually quite sophisticated, with its own controller — the MOS8726, REC — that provides fast memory-transfer by DMA.

The GeoRAM cartridge. (photo by T. Conté)

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Turn a BASIC Program into a Cartridge for the C64

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The other day, I was researching the Jason-Ranheim Capture cartridges and browsing the DDI Projects on that topic. The capture cartridge is a freezer module for the C64 that allows the internal state of the machine to be saved or to be burned directly into an EPROM. These ROMs can then be installed in a cartridge that will run the frozen state. An interesting concept that I’ll probably explore closer at a later date.

In one of the archives I downloaded I came across a PDF document containing scans of a text, also by Jason-Ranheim Company, that caught my eye. The document is titled “Auto-Start BASIC Programs” and describes a simple process to convert a Commodore BASIC program into an auto-starting cartridge for the C64 or the VIC20. I got curious and decided to try this — but first I wanted to explore how it works in detail.

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