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

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

> > I guess the "older" Focus cards on ROM 03 systems dislike the "extra"
RAM,
> > and the newer ones require it?  *shrug*
>  ....
>
>      Maybe. Or, the particular Sirius release may be a factor. Do you know
> what model your Sirius is? (By the way, what sort of information comes
with a
> Sirius card?)

The Sirius is a V2.0 card.  You get a one-page photocopy of jumper settings,
essentially.  There is no mention of the "extra" RAM on a ROM 03 machine - I
picked that up from the FAQs and this newsgorup.

>      Other questions relate to Slot placement; And, since GS System is
> usually involved, memory management problems could relate to assorted
INITs
> and patches.

I was throwing every card I had around every possible slot configuration,
finally paring it down to just the Focus drive and the Sirius RAM card
(which, honestly, I never suspected).  It was impossible to test without the
RAM card, since the GS/OS apps in question (read: large) kinda need the RAM.
=)

It looked so much like a drive problem because running the same apps from
floppy did _not_ show the problem.  What really surprised me was the other
problems that were solved (very noticable gray pixellation on the HyperCard
IIgs 1.1 home stack, almost predictable crashes when closing HyperCard with
Balloon 2.0 loaded, random _un_predictable drops to the monitor, etc.  I've
*tried* to crash this thing now, and can't.

>      Meanwhile, the fact remains that accessing Expansion Memory beyond
4MB
> on the IIgs requires implementing a hardware kludge. Apple specifies 4MB
as
> the maximum size for Expansion Memory-- i.e. as addressed by the Fast
> Processor Interface)-- in both editions of the 'IIgs Hardware Reference'
> (including the ROM 3 GS).

Understood - I've read the engineering details on the theory of operation.

>      Alltech seems to have never relased comprehensive, detailed
information
> about operation of the Sirius with more than 4MB installed. This leads to
> problems.

There are only so many ways to go about it, honestly.  I personally view it
as nothing more than latter-day bank-switching.

>      For example, your experience vis-a-vis the top 1MB seems to be
directly
> opposite that of another user. It would be nice to know when one should or
> should not yank the top 1MB on an "8MB" card.

Unfortunately, unless there is a wide variety of Sirius and/or Focus card
revisions (the Focus has no version number on it), the only practicable way
I can tell is via the FocusDriver/AppleWorks GS 1.1 test.  If you need to
remove the SIMM, it _will_ fail after very light usage, particularly in the
spreadsheet function.

Rodney