Quoted from barakandl:I think they have to be double sided unless you want to solder machine pins from the top side. That might be difficult for someone with limited practice.
That was my thought too. If you made the boards single sided you would need to use machine pins or solder the RAM directly to the adapter. Neither of those options are that difficult. Personally, I would probably just solder the RAM to the adapter, if I were using the ~$2 RAMs and etching my own boards. I'm not planning to do either of those things at this point.
You could also make a double sided board with the files I provided. If you had any of those PCBs made by a board house into a two sided board, you would have the through-hole pads on both sides and you could solder in a dual-wipe socket much easier. I also included the bottom layer in the gerber files so the option is there even for people etching their own, which was the whole point in the first place.
Agreed. I've done many revisions of these stupid RAM adapters over the years and learned what works for me. Like offsetting the DIP packages the way I did. In this case that made the board slightly smaller, and allowed me to route the traces the way I wanted. I could have moved them closer together, but then assembly gets tougher. It's a balance.