APPLIED ENGINEERING GS-RAM III - Manual (Page 3)

INTRODUCTION
About The GS-RAM III Card
Memory Expansion--The GS-RAM III allows you
to increase the Random Access Memory (RAM) capacity
of your Apple IIGS. RAM is the memory that can be both
read From and written to--the addressable memory. Many
programs automatically look for and use available RAM to
give them more room to operate (desktop space). Many
programs load themselves into the available RAM at
startup. This greatly increases their performance because
it reduces or eliminates the need to access the relatively
slow mechanical floppy drives. GS-RAM Ill lets you
increase the available system RAM by a maximum of 4
Megabytes (Mb) on the board itself, in increments of 1
Megabyte. This means that IIGS ROM 03 machines (with 1
Megabyte installed on the motherboard) can have a total of
5 Megabytes while the earlier IIGS’s can have a total of 4.5
Megabytes.
6Mb--when you want to expand beyond 4Mb, you can
attach the 2Mb “Piggyback” Expander. It connects directly
to the GS-RAM III and adds its 2Mb to the 4Mb on the GS-
RAM HI for 6Mb s of memory.
R A M Disks--Use some of the GS-RAM memory to set
up a RAM Disk. A RAM disk acts as an internal, electronic
hard disk giving you super-Fast access to applications that
are copied to it. Loading from and storing to a RAM disk
can be as much as 20 times faster than a conventional disk
drive because i t eliminates the mechanical activity
required by a conventional drive.
DMA Support--The GS-RAM III is fully DMA
(Direct Memory Access) compatible. Any device that
requires DMA-style memory can use all the available
memory on GS-RAM III.
Introduction i