I've posted this issue on Twitter before, but lets follow up here. I bought a BigRAM 2630 for my A2630, Rev 9. After it arrived, it turned out, my A2630 has the expansion connectors installed upside down. This isn't the well-known "reverse A2630" issue, as the connectors are on the backside, not the component side, but the keying is exactly the opposite of what the BigRAM expects, and what other A2630s have, when comparing to photos online.
Link to the mentioned Twitter post/thread:
https://twitter.com/chainq/status/1461243779206328321
First it was assumed it was just a manufacturing issue at Commodore, one of many. But after thinking about it for few more days, and checking the card more thoroughly, I think it's more likely that someone attempted to fix this originally "reverse" A2630 to a regular one, but mounted the connectors on the backside upside down int the process. The card has some leftover solder blobs on some of the connector pins (no solder bridges though) and also some soldering on some of the ZIP RAM pins.
Now, this puts me in a difficult situation. Jens proposed we should fix this issue by cutting the keying on the connectors off with a dremel, so the BigRAM would fit, but I'm not so comfortable with this idea.
First, if the card was modified, there's absolutely no guarantees the expansion connectors would even work at all, so cutting into them feels a bit "meh". I mean this is already a card which is not so rare, and not original, but still feels ... wrong. So of course, the another option would be soldering off the connectors and putting them back with the right orientation, but this would put the 30+ years old 4 layer PCB of the card in jeopardy, and I might end up with a totally non working card in the end. Another option would be to reverse the connectors on the BigRAM instead of the A2630, but this would invalidate my warranty of course, and might kill the BigRAM. And if the connectors were modified on the card, they might not be functional at all, so I'd end up with an unusable BigRAM AND a not expandable A2630. Same if I'd request Jens to make me a special version, he can't test the card, but if my A2360 was modified, and the expansion connectors are broken, it might not work at all again, and we would have no way to figure out why. So, yeah. Still back to dremmel time?
Well, another idea I had was to buy both the A2630-side, and the BigRAM side connectors too, and make a makeshift adapter, which fits between the two sides, therefore allowing a test of the A2360 with the BigRAM. If it works, then I'd be much more willing to go modifying whatever needs to be modified. Jens, could you please share the part number of the connectors on the BigRAM card and on the A2630? Also, if I would still go crazy, and solder either the BigRAM or the A2360, I could at least install new connectors, instead of trying to salvage/reuse the old ones, which might be even more difficult.
BTW, don't worry, I understand how this affect the BigRAM's warranty, and that I'm on my own in this regard, due to the nature of my hardware.