So, I decided to test my DIY Latch circuit along with the memory by using an ATmega8515 AVR microcontroller to try writing to , and reading from the SRAM chip. In theory, this wouldn't be difficult because the ATmega8515 conveniently has support for using external memory in much the same way as the 8085 microprocessor (also needs the latch), but in testing, not so great. I wrote some code for the AVR that writes the values 0-255 into address locations 0-255 in the SRAM chip then tries to read them back and compares, to see if the write was successful. But instead of doing the full program, the AVR hangs when it reaches the point where it must read from the SRAM chip, and gets stuck. This must be a problem with reading in hardware, I just can't seem to find what is the problem, but I think that it could have to do with my DIY Latch circuit not being entirely up to spec. Well, if anybody who is actually bothering to read this Log has any ideas or advice to help with this problem, feel free to comment.

Here are some pictures with everything rigged up (it's a glorious mess of wires!):

a close up of the wiring for the 8K x 8 bit SRAM chip ( MT5C6408 )

other pics:

Hopefully I get this working soon. If not, I may just give up on my DIY Latch Circuit and actually spend some money to get bunch of 74x573 type Octal latches. which are known to work in this type of setup.