Audio RAM

upper ARAM chip, straddling regions C4 and D4 of the jwdonal schematic

There are two ARAM chips on the SNES Motherboard, both connected to S-DSP. All accesses from the SPC700 go through the S-DSP. ARAM is a total of 65,536 bytes (or 256 pages, or one bank, or 512 kilobits) in size. ARAM is timeshared between the S-SMP and S-DSP.

According to fullsnes, ARAMs consisting of two Motorola MCM51L832F12 32Kx8 SRAM chips tend to contain a repeating 64-byte pattern of 32 zeros and then 32 FFh's at power up.

ARAM cannot be accessed directly by the 5A22 and it cannot participate in DMA.

See Also

• WRAM
• VRAM
• ARAM Write Enable Flag
• Uppermost Page

References

1. subparagraph 22.5.3 on Page 2-22-3 of Book I of the official Super Nintendo development manual
2. subparagraph 1.3.3 on page 3-1-2 of Book I, lbid.