Subj : Re: Apple //e w0rld
To   : Spectre
From : paulie420
Date : Mon Jun 19 2023 18:16:59

 Sp> Chuckle, RamCharger and a RamFactor card were on the drool list.  In
 Sp> typical AE fashion the combo tended to be a bit unreliable.  Probably
 Sp> bad quality control rather than initial design or QC.  The RamCharger
 Sp> essentially turns the RamFactor into a solid state drive. There should
 Sp> be a battery, a wall charger and a card that plugs into both the
 Sp> motherboard and the "ramcard". It supplies both refresh and power.

Yea, I'm gonna have another POKE around.. I'll be certain to PEEK in all the boxes, but I don't think theres a RamFactor card; its an expansion slot card, right, not some daughter board or anything?

Yea, I have the RAMCharger box, wall wart and cable that would connect to the mobo (ground) and RamFactor... I can see how a RAMDisk would have been awesome back then - but man, people really trusted software to that?! I guess more just for coming back up after some time away... but not like DATA that you didn't have elsewhere... :P

 Sp> The issue will be DMA I expect.  You can only have one DMA device in your
 Sp> IIe, it doesn't know what to do with more and causes bus issues. Most IIe
 Sp> accelsiorators run in almost full time DMA suspending the onboard
 Sp> processor function.

Ahhhh, yer prolly right - theres DIP switches for ignoring CARDS that interfere w/ DMA, but not for the audio in/out jacks - makes sense.

That dang card, too - many times you'll get all the way to playing a game and remember yer gonna have to go shut it off. But it is neat seeing BASIC or applications loading 3x quicker than normal.

 Sp> Hmmm could be a couple of things... could depend on the age of the IIe,
 Sp> early versions weren't reliable at "double hi-res" the mode that Apple
 Sp> Desktop runs in.  It could be faulty memory on your 80col card. Off hand
 Sp> you'd probably want to disable the accelerator and try the self-test,
 Sp> ctl-solid apple-reset see if it throws any errors.  Or it could be the
 Sp> accelerator again, they tend to run in full time DMA as much as
 Sp> possible, they also tend to mirror Bank0 ram.  This means it can't see
 Sp> the Bank1 memory which lives on the 80col card and is vital to the
 Sp> missing sections of video.  Basically double-hires uses the video ram on
 Sp> the motherboard, and the equivalent out on the 80col card to give double
 Sp> the width graphics.  The disks you've been playing with aside from the
 Sp> Desktop would be running in Hi-Res.. doesn't access the extra memory and
 Sp> will look fine.
 Sp> 
 Sp> You might want to check the 80col card, it'll be in the auxilliary slot
 Sp> away from the other slots.  It may be a RamWorks card, more memory than
 Sp> the regular 64k on an 80col card.  It'll hold up to 1Mb depending on its
 Sp> version. Early ones were 256/512k.
 Sp> 
 Sp> While playing around with it initially, I'd be inclined to pull the
 Sp> accelerator.  See what works, and once your happy with that and
 Sp> everything functions put the accelerator back in and see what it
 Sp> interferes with.

Ok - lots to digest here; first, thanks for all these suggestions - I've exported the .txt and will make sure I do all your suggestions... I hadn't thought about the accelerator, but I usually have it switched OFF when I'm loading a game - however, maybe a DIP switch isn't set right; if you change the order of cards, it could easily be overlapping something. Thanks.

I have ran the RamTester software and all RAM came back OK - but I dunno if thats to be 100% trusted. I've also ran the BA-CTRL-RESET test, and it went thru its video modes and didn't throw any errors there... 

Regardless, tho, you've given me lots to check into; if I can't iron it out I'll get some photos posted to the forum communities; thanks, Spectre!



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