Re: Confirmation of Focus drive problem and request for ROM 03 GS owners with RAM expanders

["Rodney Hester" <rod3@mindspring.com>]

"Rubywand" <rubywand@swbell.net> wrote in message
3B245E48.3A3D3FC8@swbell.net">news:3B245E48.3A3D3FC8@swbell.net...
>
>      On our IIgs booting Sys601 (with FocusDriver in System/Drivers), the
file copy test you suggest (HyperStudio and a stack file copied to Focus)
was tried with and without the typical 32K cache (set via the Sys 6.0.1 RAM
Control Panel).  Results consistently favored the With-Cache setup; but, the
time saving is very small-- 3% or 4%.

Interesting.  I get slightly reduced performance with the software cache,
but these things are almost impossible to notice without a stopwatch.  =)

>      Anyway, as with Ludowick's experience, we have never had any problems
with our Focus drive; and, our system is somewhat different from yours--
ROM-01 with 4MB GS-RAM III; RamFAST SCSI in Slot 2; old (approx 1994) 80MB
Focus from Parson's Engineering in Slot 7.

When was your drive purchased?  I've heard from another user who indicated
older units do indeed exhibit this "large file corruption" problem and have
to be serviced/replaced by Alltech.

>      This problem was reported to be related to having just 7MB plugged
into a Sirius in a ROM 3 8MB system. (For something about this check out
Scott G's observations at
http://home.swbell.net/rubywand/Csa2HDWHACK.html#021 .)  Don't know whether
some alternative explanation has been offered.

That's fascinating.  I _did_ remove the last 1MB SIMM from my Sirius card as
an experiment, but put it back before I noticed this problem.  I've checked
the connections and they're good - it really does look like a card problem,
unfortunately.

This is still very good information!

>      Vegas Gambler runs fine on our ROM-01 GS with 4MB. Since it's a
fairly old (pre-ROM 3) game, the problem may relate to assumptions the game
makes about GS System which are not supported by ROM 3.

It works OK on my ROM 3 machine without the Sirius card.  Seems to me that
since the "bottom" 8th meg actually supercedes the 1MB on-board RAM, it's
probably some sort of obscure incompatibility (remapped memory locations,
perhaps?).  I plan to ask Tony about it.

>      Do you have a SCSI card plugged into your IIgs? If you do, you might
try setting Direct Memory Access to "Off".

No SCSI card, just the Focus.

>      Other quickie tries:
>
> o- Scrap the "Desktop" file in the Icons/ folder of all partitions

Tried that, didn't help the corruption.

> o- Scrap non-essential INITs (like CloseView)

Tried that, nuked all non-Apple INITs and EasyAccess and CloseView as well.
Didn't help until I disabled FocusDriver.

> o- Scrap all screen savers

None present.  Would love to have Twilight II 2.0, though.  =)

> o- Scrap all files related to AppleTalk

That might be a little more difficult, as I _need_ AppleTalk.  :)  However,
I did run a reinstall test prior to installing AppleShare, etc. and had the
same problem.

Thanks for your insight!

Rodney