I was digging through my boxes with PC junk and re-discovered an original Gravis Ultrasound v3.4 I bought from Value Village about a decade ago.
It had 2 out of 8 DIP-20 sockets populated with 44256 DRAM ICs @ 60ns. 256KB of memory with potential for 1 megabyte.
I also found a Trident TVGA8900C video card with 8 matching 44256 ICs @ 70ns timing. I bought it around 2004 from the awesome computer junk store west of Younge and Bathurst.
Gravis Ultrasound works fine with memory up to 80ns. It was time for memory swap!
It took a bit of fiddling to dislodge chips from the sockets they were in for the last quarter of century. Inserting them was very easy.
I installed Gravis Ultrasound with upgraded memory in my awesome ALR Flyer VL 486 PC. I tested memory with setup tool, it all checked out fine.
I played both Second Reality from Future Crew and Crystal Dreams 2 from Triton. Those demos were mind blowing back in 1993-94. But they look underwhelming now. It would’ve been kinder not to revisit this memory.
In the lower left corner, you can see soldering pads for sockets for 512KB EDO RAM SOJ chips. Such chips were later used in Gravis Ultrasound Max, GUS Ace and most PCI SVGA video cards. It would be fun to try to transplant sockets from an old PCI SVGA card and see if GUS works with SOJ EDO RAM.
