Denial

Hi, I'm new here.
I picked up an attic-find Vic20 in good condition with an Avenger cartridge, and requiring a RAM expansion for some more interesting tasks, I picked up a Mosaic RAMMASTER 32K off ebay.

Does anyone have any manual for this or perhaps explain to me how it's supposed to work?

There's a pass-through port where I can piggy-back another cartridge on the back.
Also there's a set of 8 DIP switches on the side. They are labelled "1 2 3 R 5 W X P", and there is a jumper block next to them.

I take it that 1,2,3 in the down position activate those banks of expansion RAM. Certainly flipping around with those change the amount of memory available. I assume 5 is for the cartridge area RAM because flipping X on without 5 passes through to the piggy-back port and the cartridge starts

The other DIP switches I have no idea about. Flipping P however won't display any text upon start up (just white/cyan screen)

Can anyone fill me in on the other switches? I assume this device can possibly also dump the cartridge somehow....

Heya

Yes, 1-3 and 5 will be for the individual 8k RAM areas. $A000 (aka block 5) is the standard boot memory area for cartridges, and almost all Vic20 cartridges use that area. Aside from the Scott Adams adventures. That's why you have to type the SYS command to begin them.

P may be PAUSE. I found a magazine article about the cartridge, and it said it had a pause switch. Same article mentioned a write protect mode, so that could be W and/or R. Looks like X could be disable the pass through as you discovered, and you can take the piggyback cart out without switching the Vic20 power off!

Just looking at wikipedia, it does seem to suggest that there is a write protect for the cartridge ROM area, so that it behaves exactly like a cartridge.

I'll keep experimenting.