I think you're right on target with that.

A hobbyist that can do their own board work should be looking at building these themselves. After all, most of these installs require board reworking to fit anyways (installing the wide 24 pin socket). If you can't do that, you can't build the nvram adapters in the first place.....and you're going to be paying somebody do to BOTH for you.

Some hobbyists throw dollars at what they can't/won't do. That's where the business/marketing guys step in. The point is, there's room for both.

+1 on ordering from Andrew.

U212 STERN WHITESTAR - here a photo:

LotR U212.jpg

LotR with adapter.jpg

What about the ones that ksarcade has? They are 25.00 though. I bought one for my rottendog board.

Looks fine. But I have to Laugh. Those are the ones many of us are building ourselves for around $5.00USD now with parts from China.

Yeah I had noticed that they coincidentally added those to their inventory after more people were posting about DIY'ing with off-the-shelf parts here earlier this year. I'm more shocked it didn't happen sooner.

Are you still surprised by anything in this endless NVRAM story? Me not

Got another order of china nvrams today. they were $1.73 each plus shipping, worked out to $2.30 each. Ordered Dec 2, came today (Dec 23). That's the quickest so far. All were fm1608-129 except one was 1608m. Came packaged just like the others, stacked together, wrapped in cellophane, in a padded envelope. All test good but this wrapping technique is really weird. two completely different companies too. I still have 3 more orders from 3 different companies. The one i'm really dying to see is the Nov 30th order for the 20 cent nvrams! that one should be here soon, if it actually comes! (they say it's sent.)

Nice! I grabbed ten more for $20.03 shipped... Why not lol

That'd be insane if that works out. And I'm sure the seller(s) would immediately sell them in the thousands if Pinsiders heard of it, so if you get them and they're legit.. probably order another couple of hundred

Yea, just used the Aliexpress link another member posted... Shipped the other day, will see..

I have ordered 10 pieces for $20.25 shipped on December 23. I have got a notice on December 27 that the lot is shipped. I will report back when I get the package.

I'm still waiting for my nov 30th shipped package.
So don't hold your breath.

It is supposed to take a bit longer at 20c for a piece .

More like never me thinks

Anyone know if these can go in a Zaccaria? Have a devil riders I would like to eliminate the batteries on.

Not this 6264 DIP chip as-such. You would need 2x 5101 NVRAM Adapters or a custom built adapter (2nd link below).

Lots of 5101 NVRAM Adapter choices these days, but you'll need one that can fit 2x next to one another in a small footprint. Cheapest price on one of those is over at http://www.denikar.com ($16ea shipped or cheaper in quantity). Those are quality parts, genuine CYPRESS parts being used.. a bargain IMHO.

There's also this kind of setup that takes a single SMD nvram and adapts it to both sockets (I'm not sure if this is for sale though):
http://www.zaccaria-pinball.com/products/brink/index.html

If using 2x 5101 nvram adapters of other brands.. make sure the clearance in mpus with 2x 5101 sockets works out. The Denikar 5101 adapter footprints are very small.. not much bigger than the 5101, so clearance should be fine. There are some 5101 nvram adapters that wouldn't fit next to one another though if 2x are used.

Ordered 20 of the ones at about $2 each from aliexpress. Show as shipped, guess I'll know how they work sometime in late January judging by expected shipping times.

what i don't understand is that when i order things from Ebay that come from China, they are here in 10 to 15 days. But order from AliExpress, and it takes 30 days. how can that be?

There are also sellers on Ali that will ship faster than the 31 days shown. for the most part, the longer shipping times (30 to 45 days) are on the sellers with rock bottom prices. The higher priced products (even these NVRAMs) come with faster shipping times.

You really have to pay close attention to the ship time shown in the listing before clicking on BUY. The thing that is a bit weird is it seems the low priced sellers take about 2 weeks to even tell you your order has shipped. Where the shorter ship times usually alert you in only a couple of days. At least, that has been my experience so far.

I am still waiting 30 plus days on some ebay china socket strips. My aliexpress nvram showed up much quicker

I socketed the nvram to my Jokerz board and rejumpered it. Works just peachy.

For the rejump you just moved the resistor from W5 to W6?

yes, It turned out to be pretty straight forward.

That's awesome. I've done the already socketed ones before and once my next NVRam order comes I'm gonna tackle my Banzai Run (another system 11b). I couldn't find a straight answer about the jumper though. Very cool.

Well my $2 Aliexpress Nvrams arrived! Same as everyone else, plastic wrapped stack. All the same, look brand new to me, and two week shipping from China during the holidays... Not too shabby!

Sorry, $2 each... Grabbed ten for $20.30

Mine would have came yesterday but someone had to sign for it. 10 for $20 deal. Gotta go to the post office on Monday now.

I just got 20 more in the mail. These were packaged the same, in clear plastic wrap, in a stack. But slightly different outcome this time. A bunch had bent pins. To the point where you could not test them in the Neo tester because they would not touch the Zip socket. Hard to say if this was mis-handling, or post office bends.

After straightening legs, I had some failures this time - two chips of the 20. Well actually one chip, which just failed badly. The other chip was missing two legs. Not from shipping either. Because they weren't bent, they were just half leg size. So i soldered new legs onto those two 1/2 legs, and the chip tested fine. So really just one failure out of 20. Cost was about $2 per chip with shipping.

Curious when you ordered Clay, I'm hoping to get mine soon but nothing yet. Of course can't tell what's happening from the China Post tracking site. Of course, I'll probably order more as well if they work as everyone else has had them work but I'm thinking it's time to order the NeoLoch now!

It takes almost 30 days for them to show up. Sometimes a little less sometimes a little more but I would say on average 25 to 30 days at least for me.

5101-dip28_(resized).png

I created a new 5101 adapter for people that like to DIY. All through hole components. Jumper out and 7400 installed = dual CE operation. Jumper in and 7400 out = single CE operation. Might offer them up as kits for people buying their own FM1608.

Looks cool. The only thing I would consider is connecting the inputs and outputs of the 5101 in parallel on the PCB. It's not strictly necessary because these pins should be connected on any MPU that this adapter would be used with, but I'm not sure that the adapters will be able to be tested in the NeoLoch RAM tester with the layout you're using.

Good call. updated the pic in the post above.

Of course i had a bunch of traces around p11 i had to navigate around. Just added a few VIAs. might clean it up some more before i order.

Since it used in a lot of places, you can add just a tiny bit of PC to your design and run a Ground trace along the outer edge to provide all those grounds to unused pins. It would certainly clean up your design a bit. On the layout program I use, it allows me to hand route some traces prior to running the auto route routine. I don't know if you are auto routing or doing it 100% by eye and hand?

Also, remember unless you plan to read out the stored data in the future, you don't need to route A1 -> A1 and D0 -> D0 etc.. You can use any address pin that is closest to an adjoining address pin and the same for any data pin to pin choices. It doesn't matter how the cells in the device are selected internally or where a 1 or 0 is stored on a data pin. Whatever gets written in, will get read out correctly regardless of your choice of address and data pins. This can also drastically clean up a lot of traces and vias if you just look at what you see now and adjust for it and try another routing.

For example: 5101 Pin 1 is A3. 6264 Pin 2 is A12. In your design, they are right next to each other. If you change your schematic to be 5101 A3 -> 6264 A12, you get a short trace going pin to pin instead of scrolling all around and passing through a via to get to pin 7 of the 6264.

Not trying to steal your thunder, but here are some routing ideas. Should be the equivalent circuit with no vias. You would have to mount the bypass cap on the bottom. There should be room. Or use SMD. Both pads are there.

5101_Adapter_DIP_RAMTRON_(resized).jpg

Same holds true for your choice of gates within the 7400. And you might want to look into at least grounding the unused inputs of the 7400. Floating pins can cause problems. You can leave the unused outputs open

Well, I ordered 20 FM1608-120-P IC's from aliexpress from "FU XING LCD" in mid-december at $22.50 per batch of 10 ($2.25 ea). They arrived yesterday (1/6). They were all stacked together, wrapped in plastic, and put into a small padded envelope.

With a neoloch tester, 10 chips tested good, 9 failed, and one had a broken leg.

20160107191319012_(resized).jpg

Bent legs will cause ram fails in neo tester. The legs are just long enough to reach the socket. If bent they don't touch. Bend straight and retest.

I already did go through and straighten them the first time around. I went through the bad ones again and made sure they were all perfectly straight, and I did manage to get one to test good. But, that was it--the rest still failed.

So, 11 good, 9 bad.

If the legs are bent in towards the chip Body this will also influenced their length. Make sure that they're not bent right against the body of the chip. There's obviously a problem since you retested one and now it works. I seriously doubt you have nine bad chips. This is a problem with the zero insert force neo tester socket.

The legs are all as close as I can get them to a 90 degree angle to the chip.

I have found sometimes, it helps to slide the chip back and forth with a little tension on the zip socket on my programmer ( not all the way latched) to get a good contact on some older chips.

I've occasionally had a chip fail in the tester, opened the lever to the ZIF and closed it, and then had it pass. I figured sometimes one of the pins wasn't making a good connection. Nice to know that's most likely what was happening.

I have a rottendog board for my Funhouse. It has NVRAM and the 3 - AA battery holder with the long wires. Does it help to install the batteries and the NVRAM.... meaning by saving clock settings etc?

I see little benefit to using a NVRAM chip while leaving batteries still connected since the RAM will always be powered and simply act like normal SRAM.

Without looking at the data sheet, it is possible that the Ramtron chip may use more power than a low power CMOS static RAM would. And therefore drain the batteries faster.

Got another round of 1000pcs in. These look better than my last batch. So far each one i have read still had Ricoh copier stuff on them.

In my last round of 1000pcs i had maybe 5 bad ones out of the tube and only one report of DOA at a customer. Zero complaints otherwise.

20160108_080048_(resized).jpg
20160108_080137_(resized).jpg

back in stock at nvram.weebly.com