62256 SRAM Tester

If you've been my youTube channels lately, and following the VIC-20 story, you'll know I built a Hyper-expander. You may have also noticed that it didn't really get used much in the repair video. There's a reason for this.... 

It didn't work.. 

Even once the VIC-20 was repaired, nothing I did would get the VIC to recognise more than the 3K extension. The EPROM wouldn't load at all. 

Investigation required. 

The cartridge was pulled apart , the EPROM checked, and the two 74LS148 gates. I wish I'd socketed everything! The EPROM and the two decoders proved innocent.  

That leaves the 62256 RAM IC's. 

So, how to check them?

I could pull the ZX81 apart, and test them in there, but we can't access the full 32K.

SO, inspired by the 2114 tester I constructed for the 2114 SRAM during the VIC repair (https://github.com/skjerk/Arduino-2114-SRAM-tester) I decided to have a look for an Arduino based tester, whilst there is a version for an arduino Mega, I don't have one to hand. The issue is, a normal Uno (or any ATMega328 based Arduino) doesn't quite have enough pins. We need 15 outputs for the address bus, and 8 for the Data bus. Two 74HC590 counters are fielded in to drive the address bus from just two pins (clock and reset).

Here's the theory of operation. The Arduino resets the two counter IC's to 0, by pulsing D3. A pattern of data is generated sequentially between 0b00000000 to 0b11111111 and written to the first address. It's then read back, and compared with the written pattern. If all is well, then the address is incremented by pulsing D2 and the procedure is repeated. If the pattern is not read back correctly, the fail LED is lit, and a message with the error written to the serial interface, but the test will run until all addresses have had all patterns written and read back. It takes quite a while to run.

While the test is running, both PASS and FAIL LEDs are illuminated. The green LED I added to pin 2 of U2 (via a 1K resistor) to provide some indication that the test is running, if no terminal is connected. 

Normal running looks like this on the serial interface.

62256 SRAM Tester by Doz.    

Running test pattern 00000000

Running test pattern 00000001

Running test pattern 00000010

Running test pattern 00000011

Running test pattern 00000100

Running test pattern 00000101

Running test pattern 00000110

Running test pattern 00000111

...

Running test pattern 11111110

Running test pattern 11111111

All tests complete 

PASS

Hit reset to re-run

a failure looks like this:

ERROR at 0x5A64 - Got: 01100001 Expected: 01100010

The code can be found, as usual, on my github page.  https://github.com/andydoswell/platformio/tree/main/Projects/62256%20test 

Please note this is a PlatformIO framework project. You can probably clone the git, and pull main.cpp out of the SRC folder, and rename it .ino , and it'll probably run on the Arduino IDE, although I haven't tried it. 

To cut a long story short the RAMs were innocent, the fault was back in the VIC-20 itself, but at least we have a device to test them now!