Re: How do I make bigger ram chips?

Posted by cadet1620 on
URL: http://nand2tetris-questions-and-answers-forum.52.s1.nabble.com/How-do-I-make-bigger-ram-chips-tp3614086p3614568.html

kingpinzs wrote

I tried to make a 1mb ram chip but it just locks up the simulator when loading it with no errors.
Do I need to make my 128k ram built in before I can make the 1mb one?

A 1mb RAM would require 64 RAM16K chips. I built a modified Hack computer that required writable program memory using 4 RAM16Ks to implement a write-back cache in front of the ROM32K. Each of the 5 RAM16Ks in the computer tries to create its own UI panel in the simulator (in addition to the UI panels for ROM, Screen, ALU, etc.) and Java's automatic layout scrambles things rather badly. My guess is that the attempt to make 64 UI panels is causing the hang.

Since the TECS tools were written to handle the Hack computer, not as general tools, I see this as a minor issue. In my professional job I'd probably enter this bug as priority 2 (1-5, 1=no plan to fix) with the proposed fix to be adding an error message that more than one RAM with UI is not supported and aborting the HDL load.

--Mark