Upgrading Atari 1040STfm RAM

[somaboy]

Hi,

I wonder what it would take to upgrade my 1040STfm to 4MB. I've read that in some models this would require some tricky soldering but not sure if that applies to mine.

And are the right SIMM's still available somewhere?

Thanks

Soma

[mal7921]

Well the bad news is that the STfm series did not use SIMMs so expanding the memory used to mean soldering chips over the existing ones.

However the good news was that companies made boards for these machines to accept SIMMs though again they could be fiddly to fit.

However the even better news is that there are still people around today to look after, service and upgrade these venerable machines nearly 20 years after they went out of production.

A trawl through the links page will give you some names and web addresses, though in the UK it has to be Barrie at Keychange, although he will do international orders if no one else can help.

Hope that helps you with what you want.

[somaboy]

Thanks for the info, Mal.

I guess replacing my STfm with an already upgraded STe or Mega STe will probably not be significantly more expensive than the cost of parts, shipping and labour involved in upgrading it...

[mal7921]

That really depends on how much these machines are where you live. It may be worth getting an STe and using the 1040 as a backup machine for example, or sychronise the 2 if your planning to use them live.

It really depends on what you want to do and how much you want to spend. In all cases with Atari stuff, the internet and ebay especially is your friend (http://www.ebay.de especially as Germany was Atari's single biggest market).

Barrie (barrie@keychange.co.uk) may well have the SIMM interface you need with instructions, you could buy it and find someone locally to fit it, assuming you don't want to try yourself of course.

[miguel]

I have a 2.5MB STFM which was expanded a long time ago by Real World Interfaces (that's the same company that does the Devil Fish mods for the TB-303) the work they did looks very fiddly to me, they soldered in some additional memory chips and some very fine interconnecting wires on account of the difference in the number of legs the new chips had, they didn't need to piggyback the chips because my motherboard revision had space provided for additional chips.

[somaboy]

In the meantime I discovered there's a solderless DIY upgrade kit called Marpet Memory kit. It still turns up on Ebay from time to time. It only works on STfm models that have a socketed cpu, but most of them do.