Question(s) on AST RAMSTAK Plus & AE Vulcan Hard Drive

[capknight <cepheusfilms@gmail.com>]

Hello!

Been digging up some Apple IIGS stuff recently to go through a bunch
of old disks. I have a few machines, but was looking around eBay and
came across a cool auction and picked it up.

It is a Woz ROM 3 IIGS w/ a 40mb Vulcan Hard Drive (Western Dig
inside), a 1.5mb Apple Memory card and a MDIdeas Supersonic Audio
card. The auction also included an Apple SCSI Card and a AST RAMSTAK
Plus 1mb card.

The AST looks pretty cool! I was able to track down some 64k 120NS
EEPROMS on digikey as well as some 256k 120NS chips. The AST
documentation (it actually came with the box, manual, disk and card..
wow..) doesn't list 64 Kb or 256 Kb as an EEPROM option. The
documentation lists 2Kb - 32Kb per socket for the EEPROM and 8 Kb - 64
Kb for the EPROM. It also lists 200 ns for both.

I'm wondering if anyone has tried using larger or faster EEPROMs with
the card (or if anyone has used the card at all). Looks pretty cool to
have GS/OS in ROM.

The second question is about the Vulcan Hard Drive. I've determined
that it is not the "Gold" version of the Vulcan (although I did order
a Gold ROM upgrade from ReactiveMicro along with a IIGS Microdrive
Turbo controller - whoops!). The 40 megabyte drive that came with the
unit works only if I plug it into another power source instead of
using the Vulcan supply. I think the Vulcan output is only really
capable of handling the IIGS right now. Definitely needs an overhaul.

The auction actually came with the AE Vulcan manual as well. The
manual lists a 20, 40 and 100 megabyte option for the Vulcan so I
thought I would try some other drives. So far I tried a 105 megabyte
Seagate and two different 120 megabyte Quantum drives. The IIGS boots
and the software recognizes that there is a drive available. However,
when it determines it can't see a partition and asks me if I want to
make one, it then says that the drive is unrecognized and tosses me
back into ProDOS.

Was the Vulcan gold card that different from this version? Has anyone
ever tried updating the Vulcan hard drive table to include different
drive info?

As for the power supplies, I don't suppose anyone has a list (or if
it's available somewhere) of all the caps in the IIGS power supply? I
had one start on fire in another machine and I was thinking it was the
caps had dried up.

We did order a LittlePower IIGS from ReactiveMicro, but I wanted to
pre-empt any more fires in a few of the other supplies.

Lots of fun!

Thanks for any help!

C