"der.hans" wrote:
> 
> Am 26. Aug, 2001 schwäzte Kevin Brown so:
> 
> > > Could I do without RAM and just use swap? ;-)
> >
> > Wish that you could, but I don't think the motherboard will even power up
> > without memory in the slots.
> 
> x86 won't. Proven it quite often recently :). I presume the same for most
> other architectures too.

Yep.

Even the apple 2 required the bottom 512 bytes for page zero pointers
and the system stack (0x100 to 0x1ff)... 
C64 needed those bottom 512 bytes as well, I believe.

Never heard of any sort of x86 that functioned without RAM, or
something that fooled the machine into thinking it was RAM. I'm not
exactly sure if there would be some way in hardware to BS a P2 into
thinking it had 256K DRAM when in fact it had none, and was relying
entirely on cache. Probably not.

-- 
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