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

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

Thanks to a number of folks on the newsgroup, I have positively identified
my Focus card as one of those with a problem with copying very large (over
500K or so) files - the file is corrupted once written to disk.  I will be
calling Alltech Monday for an RMA.

If you have a Focus drive, you may wish to test this yourself - the easiest
way is to run AppleWorks GS from the Program Disk floppy (just to make sure
you don't have other conflicts that could give the illusion of a problem),
make sure it works, then use Finder to copy the program executable to any
Focus partition (ProDOS or HFS, it doesn't matter) and see if it still works
OK there (in particular, entering numbers into the Spreadsheet seems to
cause things to crap out nicely).  Note that the problem will *not* show up
if you are not using FocusDriver in your System:Drivers directory, but then,
if you have a Focus, you really _should_ be running FocusDriver - it
improves performance immensely.  If you do find that large file copies to
Focus partitions results in corrupted data with FocusDriver loaded, please
contact Alltech for an RMA, as it means you have one of the "bad" cards.
(Thanks to a whole slew of people on Usenet who helped me track this one
down - it's enough to cause ones hair to go white prematurely!)

Since I'm going to be discussing problems with them anyway, I would
appreciate it if someone could confirm for me if the following problem is
specific to the Sirius RAM card and/or ROM 03 machines:

When I try to run Vegas Gambler from
http://www.inwards.com/~fairway/game_pages/vegas_gambler.html on my ROM 03
machine with an 8MB Sirius RAM card (from either HD or floppy), inserting a
coin in Slots and then pulling the handle drops to the monitor after the
first wheel stops turning.  Removing the Sirius RAM card from the machine
allows the game to play normally.

I am unsure at this time if it is a problem with *all* RAM expanders, just
the Sirius card, or the software itself.  If it's possible and convenient,
I'd really appreciate it if RAM card owners (Sirius and non-Sirius) could
take a few moments to try this game (booted from floppy, to remove any other
source of doubt) and see if you can reproduce the problem with your RAM card
still installed.  (Obviously, it should work with it removed, so there's
little point in testing that.)

If I get results back that it _does_ work with other RAM expanders
(especially if it works with other Sirius cards), I'll RMA the Sirius card
as well.  If you do have a Sirius card, please inform me of what version
your card is (found on the card itself, mine is 2.0) if you can to try to
narrow the source of the problem.  (The RAM capacity is irrelevant, I
dropped mine down to 1M and the problem still occurs.)

For those who question my fanaticism about getting one stupid Slots game
working, rest assured my sanity is indeed intact - problems like this
generally indicate a larger hardware fault just waiting to bite you, so I'd
rather know now than later.  =)

Any help sincerely appreciated!

Aspiring to Rubywand-levels of Apple greatness <G>,

Rodney