Re: TWGS questions

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article brian.hammack@rook.wa.com (Brian Hammack) writes...

>Hey all...  I just acquired a TransWarp GS card and for the most part
>it works nicely, but I keep getting these lockups.  Yes, I RTFFAQ to
>see what I could come up with on my own.  Then I discovered something:

    Examine the ribbon cable that plugs into the 40-pin CPU socket
on the IIgs motherboard. There should be a black dot somewhere on
it--if not, you have one of the original (flakely) cables Applied
Engineering made a policy of replacing.

    The old cables made the card very, very unstable. I confirmed
that was true with my 6 MHz TransWarp GS, and one of the reasons
it has been boxed up and put into storage for the past 4-5 years
now. AE may no longer be around, but you can purchase a home-made
replacement cable with gold tipped pins for around US$14 (I can't
remember who offered this service, maybe Bill Shuff? A Dejanews
search should help track him down).

>Vital data:  It's a ROM 1.5w 8S.  7MHz and 8 megs cache according to

    You mean 8K (as in 8192 Kilobytes) of cache. :-) There is
actually 16K of static RAM present, but half of it is used for
TAG RAM.

>Anyone know why I'm having these problems?  Would a newer (1.8) ROM
>help?  Where might I find one short of Germany?

    Not that I'm aware of, though it would allow you to add up
to 32K of cache. If you had a ROM v1.4 though, then I would
highly recommend replacing it since that wouldn't allow the
board to run any higher than 6.25 MHz (which is rather pokey,
even my old 8 MHz ZipGS was noticably faster I recall).

    Sometimes it makes better sense to buy a whole new TWGS
than replacing limited components. In my case, I required a
new ribbon cable, a new cache daughterboard (the ROM is not
socketed) and a new 65C816. TWGS's sell for much less than a
comparable ZipGS board (no surprise when you weigh all the
pros and cons. Heh, the one I'm getting in the mail has the
TWGS-2B GAL, yet refuses to work with the RamFAST SCSI. How
odd to say the least).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca