I recently acquired a Laser 128 EX. It came with the 4.5 ROM, but supposedly 6/6.1 have some improvements for Smartport devices. So I burned a copy of 6 and installed it. Oddly, it completely broke Smartport and 3.5" drives. Thinking maybe this 6 rom was bad since it seems hard to find and may have been a bad dump, I burned a 6.1 (which not a fan of since it boots in 3mhz mode since the EX lacks the NVRAM of the EX2 to remover what default speed should be). 6.1 also wouldnt read my FE in 3.5 or SP hard drive mode. Put the original 4.5 ROM back in, worked fine.
This seems really odd that the 6 series refuses to read anything other than 5.25" drives. To be fair, I didn't check to see if it would at least see if it would read the FE as S6D2. It ttries to read the 3.5 or SP drives, as indicated by the FE light blinking, it just fails. I loaded up Copy II+ on a physical floppy, and it too couldn't read any 3.5 or SP hard drives with the 6 ROMs.
Now, I am using my IIc brick to power the Laser. And there is ancedotal evidence that the IIc brick at 15ish volts can cause drive or display issues with the laser. But I would think the 5.25" drive would have issues if that was the case, as it has to be drawing more power than my FE. And the fact that the 4.5 ROM works seems to rule out any kind of hardware issue.
So, has anyone else seen this? Puke it be a power issue? Under load on the laser, I see 15.8vdc at idle. Didn't try and check it while trying to access the FE in 3.5 or SP mode.
Steve, at Big Mess o' Wires, blogposted some similar observations while developing the Yellowstone disk controller. Here are some noteworthy entries in his blog notes:
His version numbers don't exactly-match your numbers, but Steve's first post acknowledges that he was merely guessing how to interpret the version numbers in the ROMs. But the gist is the same: some early ROMs supported SmartPort and some later ones removed that capability. And he didn't know why.
Since Laser computers essentially integrated the UDC (itself derived from the MicroSci A2) the evolution of SmartPort capability in the Laser 128 series was undoubtedly connected to SmartPort capability in their UDC Universal Disk Controller.
Interesting, thanks. It's odd Laser took out 3.5 support in later roms. I did pull out one of my Apple 3.5 drives and confirmed the same behavior. So it is indeed the RoM and not the FE causing problems. I guess I just stick with 4.5 then.