A new IIgs 4MB RAM card?

It looks like three buyers in the past 90 days with a gold version at one point.

If I were going to limit my IIgs to 4MB, I’d rather have a card that I can swap SIMMs if something goes bad. Personally, the ggLabs 8 MB card is small, simple, and a great replacement for the Apple cards that I pull out of all the ROM3 machines...

Hi,

My name is Zane Kaminski and I designed the GW4201-series RAM expansion cards. My friend Garrett Fellers manufactures and sells them through our joint venture, Garrett's Workshop. We've sold about 50 in the past few months. I originally posted on here about the card back in January, but it took a little while to obtain DRAM chips that met our standards for quality and authenticity, so I never really followed up on the original post since it had been so long before the card actually became available.

The current-model GW4201A card we are selling is gold-plated and has received praise for its small size and low-profile design. Soon we are coming out with a new version of the 4MB card (once we sell out of the old ones) which is even lower-profile. The current design doesn't interfere with a big card in slot 7 at all, but the newer one will be even slimmer just for the sake of it.

BackOfTheBeerCooler, sorry our product doesn't meet your criteria. I considered the SIMM approach since it's a lot easier to source trustworthy SIMMs than trustworthy DRAM chips themselves, but the SIMM slot connector adds additional cost and complexity. I like to keep everything really flat and close to the board. We are planning an 8MB version, and I've already got the 8MB RAM aspect of it working perfectly in the lab, but there is another feature of the card which I don't want to announce yet. According to my calculations, the special feature is gonna make the 8MB card about 5x better than the 8MB cards offered by our competitors heheh... Of course the price will be a little higher than $35 for the 8MB card, but I promise its special feature will not disappoint, and I am aiming for well under the $90 of some competing 8MB cards without such a useful special feature. Mr. Gorla of GGLabs, maker of the the 8MB RAMGS/8, does deserve a lot of credit for sourcing such a rare 5-volt 64Mbit 8-bit DRAM chip. I could not find such a thing, and thus my 8MB card has 4 separate 16Mbit DRAMs instead of his single chip with 4x the capacity. Fewer chips is always my aim, so hats off to GGLabs, and their 8Mbyte card will remain the smallest 8MB expansion.

Freitz, I see you have an SD card interface project. Exciting! Please let me know if you would ever like to work together on a project. At Garrett's Workshop we have a pretty capable hardware lab and a mostly-automated factory system which is mostly operational hahah. It promises to make complex PCB assembly tasks pretty easy once we get the the pick-and-place vision system sorted out. I have lots of half-finished projects for Apples and Macs which are nearly complete in terms of hardware; they just need some software to make 'em work. Maybe you and I could work together on something.

Thank you for the reply! Good luck with the 8 MB and future cards.