So I got my MicroSoft SoftCard today, and I found out, even with slot 7 set to 1 mhz on the Transwarp card, the two don't play well together. I just get a bunch of garbage on the screen. Same thing if I leave the RamWorks III in. With the RamWorks, it will work sometimes, but not everytime. Take out the RamWorks, and the TransWarp, and all is good. It works 40 column, and I tried with a regular 80 column ram expander and it worked fine as well, in 80 columns. I guess there are just some things the SoftCard doesn't play well with. I knew that it wouldn't work with some cards, from my reading online, but most said that it just ignored the unsupported cards. I guess it is hard to ignore the TransWarp, as it comes up before anything else. Also, it reads the RamWorks, as it is also the 80 column card when installed. Oh well, I don't think there are any advantages to having these cards under CPM anyway. I may set up my extra Platinum for CPM when I get it back together. I've got it torn apart going through it all, cleaning and repairing minor things.
Anonymous
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Hello George,
well it might also be a result from the fact that the speed of the apple slots operate different well with higher speeds and slot 7 is definitly a bad choice for the Softcard.... with all the cards listed the choice of the slots used must be made carefully....
In fact there is a wide spread within the z-80 cards related to higher speeds... i have seen cards that have been working well at higher speeds ( 2 Mhz ) - but also i have seen a lot of them crashing unpredictibly if working faster than 1 Mhz.... in some cases it was possible to change bad behavior by changing several chips from the logic....
it seems to be same rule valid like in old Apple II mainboards: mixing chips from different manufacturers sometimes have influence on the behavior of the card... in some cases cards ( with TI chips only ) have shown better behaviour than those with mixed chips... this is specialy valid to those cards that have been manufactured before 1985.... i guess the quality control of the chips at TI was better than at other companies that permitted chips to slip over quality control with less demands ( valid at least up till 1985 )....
by explenation of the tech papers of apple the slots 2 4 and 5 work well with fast cards the slots 1 6 and 7 don´t - and slot 7 is definitly proposed to be used carsds related to video or IRQ managemant because there are some different signals from other slots....
so the default order of the cards in the slots would be:
slot 1 - printer/centronics interface / serial printer interface
slot 2 - super seriel card with modem / ramdisk / scsi or CFFA
slot 3 - Accelerator
auxiliary - RAMfast or 80 colomn ( if normal 80 column then only 1 Mhz permitted because RAMchips are too slow )
slot 4 - is the default for Z-80 unless used by other card
slot 5 - diskcontroller or alternate for Z-80 if slot 4 is not availiable or if using Z-80B fast CP/M card with CP/M 3.01
slot 6 - disk or SCSI or CFFA
slot 7 - old slow RAM-disk cards or CFFA
so under that preclusion the Z-80 should be only used in slot 4 or slot 5 !
- and the card with the Z-80 and the slot with RAMfast in auxiliary slot and Accelerator should be set by software to 1 MHz if being used for CPM with normal Softcard( CP/M 2.20 )....
If you want CP/M to run faster, you should use special Z-80B cards like the one from ALS ( the advanced CP/M cards have each own 64 kB RAM on the Z-80B card itself and work with CP/M 3.01 ! )
technical background is the interaction of the Z-80 card with the memory on mainboard....
that RAM on mainboard is rather medium slow and that causes trouble if CP/M card is operating fast but with no own memory....
and the second pitfall is, that, if the RAMfast is operating as 80 column card it should also not be working with very high speed under CP/M, because the timing of the videosection from the mainboard interfers with that... so it would therefor be recommended to slow down that card if wotking with normal z-80 softcard....
sincerely speedyG
Thanks, Speedy. Since I did the CF ROM mod, I have more choices now as to which slot I put my CFFA in, so I will do some re-arranging of cards and see what happens. I will let you know what I find out. Again...Thanks.
Jeff