What are some uses of memory expansions on atari 8-bit systems?

[mickster]

I just revived a broken Atari 130xe that I got in a bulk buy a couple of years ago.  It has a 320k ram expansion.

 

Is there a particular ram testing program out there that tests these type of expansions?

 

What are the most common uses of ram above 130k other than ram disks?

 

Would love a list of games/demos/apps that might show off the extra memory being used.

 

thanks in advance for any help.

 

Mickey

[Beeblebrox]

check out:  https://a8.fandal.cz/search.php?search=320XE&butt_details_x=x

 

 

[Peri Noid]

I usually use this: http://atarionline.pl/utils/F. Diagnostyczne/eXtended RAM test/eXtended RAM test v0.21.0 (2003-09-16)(-XI-)(SK)(en)[128k].xex

[+Stephen]

On the application side, Sparta DOS X shines with extra RAM.  Also, The Last Word (word processor) from @flashjazzcat is great - each 16kB bank can be used to chain files together for editing single large files, or you can have up to 10 documents open at once, and can freely copy / paste from any to any other.

[Mark2008]

MAE Assembler Editor is designed for 130XE and only runs in a limited way on 64k machines.  Kedit 151 works fine with 64k but can also take advantage of banked memory.

 

I don't know that the things I named are super common, but the more common uses are already named in my view - ramdisk was the killer app bitd, and sdx.

 

going on a small tangent - my personal view is that requiring banked memory is probably going to remain an uncommon choice.  Last year i was porting 'world's hardest game' to use extended memory, because the design philosophy I had at the start was to intentionally waste as much memory as I felt like- trading memory use for ease of porting.   However, what i discovered was even with that philosophy, it was pointless to use ram banking.  Even though the game goes beyond 64k in total assets, there is no need to ram bank.

 

In other, in the ram banking scheme, i would have all the assets on disk, and load them into RAM at the start of the game.  Loading all levels into ram at the start, all that did was make a trade where all disk access was at the beginning of the game.  And the benefit of that, was when switching levels later, it was faster.   But, this didn't make sense for that port - why spend time loading levels that a user may never achieve?  All I was doing was limiting the range of machine it would work on, slowing down the initial load, and what was this great time saved when switching levels, it was already sub-second, because hard drives are fast.  Ram banking made more sense in the age of floppies, where it might make sense to avoid floppy access in-game.

 

anyway, I digress.   Just for SDX and Kedit, I always want extended memory.

[Zolaerla]

If it's a PAL machine, there's Numen, which is an awesome demo that needs 320KB RAM:
http://www.atarimania.com/demo-atari-400-800-xl-xe-numen_s11402.html