That is the surface mount version SOIC-28 of the RAMTRON. You want DIP28 version.

I still think you should be buying these from me =D =D =D I still have tons of them. EEP.

Welcome to the club The club of "mmkay so these are going to take me YEARs to sell through." lol.

Hey I'll offer up a thought.. these inexpensive NVRAMs make using the MPU-200 Adapter I sell a *really* cheap upgrade of nvram on Stern MPU-200 machines.. especially if you buy a DIY kit. Maybe the small silver lining in people importing this stuff themselves is that a design that doesn't sell too well will sell a few more handfuls a year lol

http://www.pinitech.com/products/stern_mpu200_ram.php

I've got a limited number of them left right now from the first small run (about a dozen left), otherwise you'll have to contact Rob Anthony as he will also have some available while I'm in-between pcb orders. I don't normally hock my stuff in these kind of threads, but.. the design sells *REALLY* slow and it'd be nice to see it take off a bit more to pay for itself hehe. So maybe just this once. Plus you can check out the newly added holiday decorations on my site! Happy Festivus!

Is everyone comfortable with these sockets?

ebay.com link: itm

ebay.com link: usr

That user sells good enough dual wipe IC sockets and ships in tubes. They are the MH brand stamp ones that i got. Same ones you usually get from Tayda. One of my test MPUs has probably near 100 cycles on the EPROM spots. While the socket is and easy to pull the chip out after an extreme amount of insertion cycles, it still isnt causing problems.

Sure, but shipping from US is much more than from HK

Chinese brand stuff...beware of pot metal leads. I still prefer buying sockets from AMP. At least you know what you are getting.

OK -- 10 for $1.57
Does anybody have a clue as to how they don't lose money selling these?
First they have to buy the part at 'some' cost.
Ebay List and sell = fee
Paypal fee = $0.30 plus percentage
Pay for packing materials = ?
Pay for postage from china to practically anywhere = ?

Even if they got the parts for free, how can they make anything?
Makes it difficult for non-chinese seller to compete. For us - postage alone starts at nearly $3 and that's for an empty box.

As far as shipping goes..
ebay.com link: td p

Yet another kink in that wonderful free trade agreement we have with them...

Gee, I wish the US govt would subsidize our shipping rates so we could do the same thing. I would end up with lower shipping rates but higher taxes to pay for them - nothing like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Just ordered a few...thanks

Ditto on that. Ed is a huge asset to the hobby and you know the stuff you're buying from him are legit verified parts. Everyone would be wise to support him and other people sourcing legit parts when you can! I'm still hoping to pick up one of his new QuickScan80 boards when they're available!

Point taken regarding the ICs. Hence, I buy from reputable dealers on all electronics. I am still using remote battery packs with heavy duty batteries that rarely leak.

Yeah this is what I was thinking. No scratchpad RAM.. so must be using the 6264? And then, is there any endurance issue with SRAM or does it have an unlimited number of writes?

Good point on the lamp matrix data during attract mode. No clue as to the inter-workings of the software.. plenty of people here customize ROMs though, so maybe someone can shed some light on it all.

I usually do the TNT lithium battery mod, but am looking forward to upgrading my games with these and never losing high scores again! Thanks for the feedback

Exactly, the RAM is being used not only for storage but continually for various background tasks. No calculations on my part but I would expect the RAM to be accessed hundreds of times a second. Yes, most would probably be reads but plenty of it could be writes too. In writing my operating system for the RetroPinball KOD, I know I have a number of "divide by" counters running through the 1 ms and 5 ms background interrupt routines. Fortunately, for my design, using a 8051 core processor, most of that is happening within the built in RAM within the CPU chip, not on the outside data bus. But I still have some tables out there I used for lamp and solenoid on and off times. So those would see hundreds of read and writes even during attract mode.

Unfortunately the 6800 and 6809 bus design does not work like the 8051 Microcontroller cores. There is what is called a "Stack Pointer". This is a register that tells the CPU where in RAM to store values when they are pushed and pulled as well as where to store and retrieve the program counter every time a subroutine is called. A normal machine code program would be jumping all over the memory map many times a second. Even worse with code that is compiled using a higher level language where everything is done using subroutine libraries.

All of this tends to tell me that the better product is to use the Simtek parts and not the Ramtron (personal opinion here), as they perform as regular CMOS SRAM while power is applied and then do a batch transfer of data to the NVRAM portion of the chip on power down.

I think the 100 trillion write endurance of the brand new FM16W08 will make it a moot point. No way a pinball machine will make that many writes if it is powered on writing at 1mhz for the rest of our lives. 10 billion write endurance of a 1999 dated FM1608 is probably a different story.

Something tells me RAMTRON estimated far on the side of caution with the stated write endurance. Makes me wonder if they changed the write endurance rating without changing the actual die of the chip. I guess i could try and find every data sheet release during the revision 'M' die date codes and see if the endurance inflates.

Here is suspected remark comparison from the AliExpress to a real imprint. When they remark these devices, a lot of times they get the font wrong. Main thing i notice is RAMTRON never used a font, at least in my experience, that has the lower bar across the number one character.

Original imprint.
ram real.jpg

Possible remark on AliBaba
fm1608 re.png

For what its worth, remarks tend to work in my experience, but take precaution.

The AliExpress NVRAM on page one looks legit to me, I don't know why you guys are doubting it, the brand name is "Good Quality" after all! I'm in for a guinea pig pack, not much to lose. I've bought so much garbage from AliExpress for pennies it amazes me. I've bought kits of resistors and SMD components for less than what I'd consider my time worth just to organize the components in the package.

pasted_image.png

Things to keep in mind....

Imagine if this was real...

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/FM1608-120-PG-FMRAMTRON/32441362515.html

I love when the pictures don't match the title or description -- it's like "voltage regulator" is a default listing. I've seen that for a lot of items.

You can buy 4 lots for $6 shipped. This thread went from 1 to 80 ICs for $6. We need a new guinea pig, I just want to know what they get

Yes, this is something to keep in mind for sure. My whole view changed when I saw videos like that. What's it do to the life of those components? And the stuff is re-tinned, remarked. And then you know that if counterfeiting is a huge business over there, counterfeiters probably have the "old" equipment that the big guys use.. and could just copy dies and make their own chips and the quality might be total crap.

Here was a big one..
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1324420

Another interesting article:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/counterfeit-chips-on-the-rise

I'm in no way saying people should trust these imports and not assume it's without risk to be putting these in your machines. But any more, unless you know someone is definitely selling legit parts or you're buying from authorized distributors.. you might be buying unknown parts anyway. Plenty of people are willing to take the risk for you. The PCD5101P is a perfect example.. many distributors have those in stock now, brand new chips. Can't tell me they just found all this NOS of an obsolete part. Those same parts look like what you can buy on AliExpress/eBay for $1 or so each. Hey if they work, great. But I doubt that all of the distributors that are currently stocking them had the stock a few years ago before the China/HK sellers started selling them in abundance.

There's a lot of perspectives on all this as with anything. For a lot of people -- if it works, it works. Must be real. Why overpay. For other people, they'd rather KNOW where the part came from. It's ultimately up to the person buying it to know what's out there, what's being counterfeited, and what they *MIGHT* be buying. Then make an informed decision.

The real issue IMO is like with any other knock-offs of name-brand items. When it gets sold as GENUINE but isn't or is hard to discern and gets sold multiple times by people that have no clue it's a fake.

which means what?

That I need to get me one of them thar Super Duper Soldering Pots so I can re-socket a Bally AS-2518-35 board in 10 seconds flat!!!

And they still have 9996 lots of 20 chips available. Better hurry!

Which means, I'm all for saving a couple bucks. Until I prep my machines for a big party and one of them goes down hard because I chose to save $4 by buying from some salvage company with no screening or testing or QC. Then I'll wish I made that order to JAMECO.

Save a few bucks buying cheap led strips and making your own mods but don't cheap out of stuff that can take your machine down. Or worse yet, a 6821 that is maybe really a 6800 relabeled and screws up some other chip because of miss matched voltage/pinouts.

Its a $4,000 pin, I think I can afford a $6 known good and guaranteed chip over a unknown.

But that's just me.

rmy6nuM.jpg

Probably one of the guys that buys the $.10 adapter...then sells them for $15 each here...

Pretty unhealthy work environment supported by the wealthy looking for the cheapest possible price.

I just ordered these. Going to try them in a Jurassic Park that is not keeping memory for some reason.

Just got this message... Because for 20 cents, worth a shot on an order.

menosell.JPG

Yeah I didn't see that one panning out, but can't blame anyone for trying Who knows what the listing interface looks like for sellers on that marketplace, but they must have some default template for electronics that fills in voltage regulator info, because I've seen a lot of those descriptions.

They had to raise their prices after a mountain of pc boards fell and crushed a couple workers.

So i looked at the data on quite a few of my FM1608. Most of them appear to be used pulls from copy machines, which that and medical equipment my source told me they parted out the FM1608s i have came from. Looks like specifically the RICOH Afico MP 1800 are on every FM1608 in the last few tubes I opened up. They must have parted out hundreds if not thousands of this specific copy machine.

I have to figure this would be a low write environment for the FRAM. It is just going to storing the settings and what not.

If you want to poke around and look at the data on a FM1608. You can read / write them in GQ-4X with the dallas DS1225Y profile. Might be able to monkey around with audit mode stuff and high scores. Backup your ram if you really wanted to as well.

Untitled.png

90% of the space in each of these RAMs look like they are completely unused and just have 00 written all over them.

Ricoh -- probably parted out an overage of control boards. Or could have been scrapped boards due to a design flaw... or any of a million other reasons.
This got me curious. I have two cases of preprogrammed 27C512 EPROMs that I should do a dump on. These were programmed by a manufacturer who then stuffed back into tubes -- never used them. Now I'm real interested to see if there is any ASCII data on these....

Well, gee -- that was no fun. Devices are nearly empty. About a 10K block in the middle is used. Only text is at the end -- "ANDROS1606xx". No idea as to what that would be.

I just looked at the contents of a FM1608 from pinball games. In Getaway High Speed 2, there is ASCII in there about ZZ Top(custom message?) and the high score initials.

I found ASCII high scores initials and this in Baywatch's RAM
Untitled.png

Has anyone bought these NVRAM ebay.com link: itm
and installed them in a system 11? Here is what is confusing me a little.
U25 on the system 11 MPU uses a 24 pin RAM and these NVRAM are 28 pin. Now there are 4 extra holes on the board that were unused from the factory. Do you simply solder in a 28 pin socket and use the 28 pin NVRAM?

This post explains what to do with 24 pin RAM. This is what I am assuming.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/installing-barakandls-nvram-battery-eliminator-vids-review/page/2#post-2817489

That is a great post that explains how to install barakandl NVRAM with adapters in a system 11. The ones talked about in this thread are not the same. These are 28 pin NVRAM that would physically fit in the system 11 board with no adapters, utilizing the 4 extra holes in U25 that the factory didn't use. (has a 24 pin CMOS RAM from factory)

Barakandl's adapters appear to adapt a 28 pin surface mount NVRAM to a 24 pin dip socket.

System 11 and 11A use 6116 (24 pin RAM). System 11B and 11C can use either 6116 or 6264 (28 pin RAM).

For System 11 and 11A you'll need to use a 6116 adapter or convert to use 6264 using stacked sockets, etc...

If you have an 11B or 11C which uses 6116 and want to convert to 6264, install a 28 pin socket and move the jumper from W5 to W6.

I like the sound of this, since I have quite a few 11B and 11C games. It would still be great to see a nice install post of someone doing this, complete with results. I can assure you it would get at least one upvote.

I'll get some pics later today. I've been using a System 11 MPU to test my 6116 and 6264 adapters for years so I've got one sitting here set up for both

6116 nvram adatpers will work in all system 11 games. 11B and 11C can use an off the shelf FM1608 NVRAM with a jumper change which are less expensive.

I would recommend machine pin sockets for NVRAM replacements. Its not that the standard DIP sockets wont work, but the machine pin sockets are of a much higher quality.

I bought 5 of the chips last week. They showed up today, and I put them in my SEGA games. Dropped right in, worked perfectly.