I have a small stock of DRAMs that were originally purchased to support my own vintage computers, particularly, the Memotech MTX, but I have sold many of them to other users with no reports of any being faulty. However, a recent purchaser began to query whether one of the supplied RAMs could have been faulty. Although the issue turned out to be a solder bridge on his PCB, this got me to thinking that it would be good to be able to test any RAMs that I sold in future before dispatching them.

My modern programmers are unable to test these old DRAMs, so I did a bit of web searching to find a suitable, but inexpensive, tester. I came across a few, including the "Multi Retro Dram Tester / Ram Tester / Sram Tester" pictured above. This tester was a bit more expensive than others that I looked at, but appeared to be much more capable than many, with a wider range of test options and hardware support. Although I am only likely to use the most basic test functions, I decided to go ahead and buy this one.

This tester is designed and manufactured by Phil Whitmarsh who sells them through eBay and has a dedicated support site at multiretrodramtester.co.uk from where software and firmware upgrades can be downloaded. The page below contains a brief summary of the tester's features, for details, please refer to Phil's website.

I have just placed an order for one and will update this page once I've had a chance to test it . . . . . . . . .