Korg Forums

[RankAmatuer]

What follows is a long happy story of a simple event Skip to the end if wordiness bores you.

I just thought I would share my adventure in purchasing memory for my daughter's TR-76 in the hopes that someone else could get a similar deal in their own town.

I checked the usual sources online for the memory SIMMs to expand her keyboard but I was more interested in local purchase because of the immediate gratification. I checked the "normal" local B&M stores, but of course noone carried this older type of memory.

I decided to check the local mom and pop computer stores to see if they had any old SIMMs just laying around that they might part with cheaply. The first store I tried had a whole shoebox filled with various 72 pin SIMMs with paper tags showing the capacity stuck to each one. I dug through them and found only two 32 MEG sticks that had a "-60" on the chip labels indicating 60ns speed. Unfortunately these sticks were really tall, over 1.5" and I didn't think they would fit in the TR. I left empty handed.

Last Friday, a band my daughter sometimes performs with was in a little town up the road at a gig right across the street from "Dave's Computer World", which is an old store where my father-in-law purchased an IBM PC XT back in the early 80's. While there I decided to check with Dave to see what he had.

Dave had a couple of boxes with sorted and labelled SIMM chips too. None were labelled 32MEG, but he had some 16 MEG, 60ns that were not marked EDO or FAST page, so I said they probably wouldn't work for me. Dave insisted that I take them home and try them, and I could come back some day and pay if they worked. I told Dave it would cost me $8 in gas to come back to pay, so why don't I just pay him now and i won't bring them back. Dave said maybe I could buy him a Coke sometime as payment and "those things have been in this box for years." So I left, sticks in hand, with nothing paid to Dave other than a promise to consider his store the next time I purchased a motherboard or other hardware.

I took the chips home but before installing them, I did a google search for the chip numbers on the IC's and found out that they were EDO chips and 32Meg sticks and Dave had them mislabelled. I installed them in the TR and low and behold they both worked, displaying 32MEG next to each SIMM entry on my startup display - yeah!

I love it when things work out.

So the moral to this story is, hit up your local mom and pop store for any old-stock or used memory -- you might just get lucky.

RankAmatuer

[keldon85]

Have you tried loading samples onto it, because I made the mistake of using SIMM memory with the same sort of specs, but all of the specs need to be satisfied. The addressing mode is the most important, plus some are zinc plated, some aren't. It's a much safer bet to just go on ebay and look for korg triton simm memory.

[RankAmatuer]

I have successfully loaded some samples.

I tried the Steinway and a couple of the Korg Forums downloads and they seemed to work. I haven't used the samples much yet though as it is kind of a pain to have to load them each time.

Even if the RAM hadn't worked, it wouldn't damage the keyboard, so the price was still right - $0.