SiriusHardware
Veteran Member
Difficult question, I suppose what you really need to know is who made that memory expansion so you can find the installation instructions for it so that you can reverse them. Are there any identifying brands, marks, dates, model references on the memory PCB?
The folks over on atari-forum.com (which is working again now, no security warnings) would be the most likely to recognise that memory expansion and maybe point you to some information about it - I confess I have not seen that particular type before. They should also be able to tell you whether it is likely to cause any problems if you just unplug it.
If this was a 4MB expansion in its own right then obviously the onboard RAM would have had to be disabled somehow and so removing the expansion without reversing that change would leave the machine with no enabled RAM at all, but I think your reasoning is good and it sounds like the memory is the original 1MB plus an additional 3MB. In those days memory was really too expensive to waste, so it would not have made sense to use 4MB where 3MB would do.
The folks over on atari-forum.com (which is working again now, no security warnings) would be the most likely to recognise that memory expansion and maybe point you to some information about it - I confess I have not seen that particular type before. They should also be able to tell you whether it is likely to cause any problems if you just unplug it.
If this was a 4MB expansion in its own right then obviously the onboard RAM would have had to be disabled somehow and so removing the expansion without reversing that change would leave the machine with no enabled RAM at all, but I think your reasoning is good and it sounds like the memory is the original 1MB plus an additional 3MB. In those days memory was really too expensive to waste, so it would not have made sense to use 4MB where 3MB would do.