Questions - Setting up a SRAM board in S-100 / Altair system? Banks vs. Blocks?

Thanks for the input again.. On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 6:21 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote: I'm a bit confused.. all DRAMs need a refresh, and the doc for this board is pretty explicit that it needs "the correct" (ugh!) phase of the clock signal "on pins 24 & 25". Why would you think the board doesn't require such a signal, that it has its own on-board refresh hardware? FWIW, there's no crystal on-board to control an osc. to that level of precision. Hey cool, that's the kind of info I need to keep me going. I'll take a look at that in a bit.. or, take a look at that bit in a while or something. So here's a question or two. First off, how do you pronounce a letter designation with a line over it - like the outputs of a flip-flop are Q and (Q with overline). Do you say "Q high" or "Q prime".. "Q complement" or what? What about when a named signal such as CLOC or PWR has an overline? Do you pronounce it "CLOC active high" or something? (Does that line actually mean "active high"? - that's what I've surmised..) Finally, on the CPU board, pin 49 supplies the CLOC signal.. but it's actually pins 25 & 24 that the DRAM card look to for +its+ clock signal. Those pins are marked with what looks like a ?-1 and ?-2 (Greek Phi), respectively. Is that actually a 'phi', and if so, what does it mean - what are those signals, if not clock signals? And how do you pronounce them? It could be a slashed-zero, too... "?". (Generally Theta (?) is used to denote a phase / angular relationship or quantity. it looks kinda like phi, but it's not.) As for my trainer, or "chip tester" as I call it.. the only bad parts are the +/-15 (var.) supplies. IIRC, the outputs are just the wipers of 1/4W 200R pots. Need to look at that again, and maybe it's time to install some low-dropout linear regs ala LT1084 in there. Get some kind of stability and over-current protection - when I received it, one of those pots was smoked.