This is the Electron memory card board that gets as close as possible
to my ideal design, at least within the constraint of still being
reasonably priced. My earlier boards were intended as inexpensive,
easy and quick ways to make use of memory cards on the Elk.
I feel they did that job well, but there was clearly a need for a more advanced interface with more features and increased compatibility. Since before
the Mk1 went on sale I'd been working on how to bring such a design to
fruition without costing silly money. The ElkSD64 is the result of that
process. It takes the proven ElkSD32 design and adds 32K of sideways RAM,
the flash memory is now user-programmable, and the standard MMFS
software is replaced by the 'Z' version which runs from sideways RAM.
The 3D printed case of the ElkSD32 is retained, with the colour changing to white (ivory white on early models, pure white on later ones) with the design slightly modified to make removing the interface a little easier.
There are four 16K sideways banks available on the ElkSD64, two flash
and two RAM. By default MMFS is stored in the first flash bank, at boot
up it copies itself into a sideways RAM slot and runs from there. This
means none of the Electron's main memory is used, permitting games that
require PAGE to be set to &E00 - which wouldn't run on my earlier
interface cards - to work correctly.
The remaining two sideways banks, one flash and one RAM, are
available to the user. ROM images can be loaded into either slot, and
there are some games that will use the extra RAM.
The ElkSD64 has received positive reviews from a wide variety of retro computing channels on Youtube. These are a selection of the best and most informative reviews.
The ElkSD64 is available to buy via EBay UK. Click the logo to fisit the product page.
