hello,recently,i bought DK64 with an expansion pak now what im thinking is:can you modify a normal 1gb+ RAM-stick to fit into the jumper/expansion pak slot?
I would assume no. There are many different types of RAMm with different voltages and things to consider. The Expansion Pak has different pin arrangements so it would be very difficult and pointless. It would be cheaper and easier to buy an expansion pack. and isnt the expansion pak 4mb anyway? The games wouldnd utilise anything over that so its irrelevant.
they used Rambus Ram with fast timings and so. There is no way that you can put 1GB memory in it. There is also the question why you want to do such a thing?
to see what happens? but i found my supposedly non-boosting games,to have a better framerate with the expansion pak in
There is one thing you can do that will improve some games most notably Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark. It's installing a switch to change the CPU divider/multiplier so you can overclock the system from its stock 93mhz or so to something like 126mhz. But it requires some precise soldering. Ofcourse many games crash when overclocked so you need a switch. Adding RAM won't help. By the way I've heard the exact opposite from people, saying that without the expansion pak and just the stock jumper pack they get better frame rates in non-expansion pack games. So it's probably a human perception issue and not anything significant if at all in reality.
It's all in people's minds. The expansion pak simply shows up as a longer block of contiguous RAM. That's it. In games that were released before the exp. pak, they are hardcoded to use 4MB. The extra ram is completely ignored. In other games released after the pak came out, most of them also ignore it. In the cases they simply organize the framebuffer memory and zbuffer in the two new RDRAM banks (each bank is 2MB.) to allow for 640x480 16-bit color. Most people notice adding RAM to a computer helps it work better. That's because the OS is designed to check for new memory and take advantage of it. Almost all N64 code did none of those things.
I guess one question that comes to mind is could homebrew take advantage of more? Or limitation of hw.
No. The reason is that apparently the N64 is only wired up to 8 MB (as far as I know). EDIT : or could be 16. Not sure anymore.
It's also a problem of parallel DRAM versus serial RAM, isn't it? Most PCs use the former, whereas the N64 uses the latter. You'd have to have some sort of self-powered, self-clocking interface that would let you interface the N64 to a different type of memory, and for the expense you might as well build some custom chips.
