In 1981, RAM costs were prohibitively expensive, forcing Jack Tramiel to choose dynamic RAM (DRAM) over static RAM (SRAM) for the Commodore 64's 64 kilobytes of memory. While DRAM was cheaper, it proved less durable than SRAM, and decades of heat damage and internal corrosion have degraded the original chip stock. Today, replacement DRAM chips compatible with the C64 are unavailable at any price, threatening retrocomputer preservation efforts.
Hobbyist Fabio Battaglia (hkzlab) has developed an open-source adapter board that retrofits readily available modern SRAM chips into aging C64 computers, solving the preservation crisis. The adapter is specifically designed for the 250407 motherboard variant, though users with different board revisions can modify the design since the project is open source. The Retro Shack demonstrated the upgrade's effectiveness in a video showing SRAM operation in a C64, confirming the viability of the solution.
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