Laser 128EX Odd Display Issues

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Laser 128EX Odd Display Issues

I recently acquired a Laser 128EX, and populated the memory card to 1MB. I tested out Henry Lowe's Card Cat and RAMWerks programs, and I'm seeing some odd display issues that I'm trying to figure out if my Laser is having issues, or it's some odd bug in the program that affects Lasers. So if any Laser owners would be willing to check out these programs, I'd appreciate it.

 

 

In Card Cat, the display issue I see is when it first starts up and says "scanning x of 7", once it hits slot 3, it starts incrementing numbers after the 7. So it will say 3 of 71, 4 of 72, 5 of 73, etc.

 

 

 

With RAMWerks, it's failing the first bank of memory. And all the other memory says OK, but has a question mark next to it.  I've shifted the ram banks, and bank 1 always fails. Additionally, the percent completed is also showing extra digits. Like "Test Progress 76%7" and "Testing RAM bank 10 of 129".

 

 

I did reach out to Henry, but hoping to get some additional data points from other Laser owners. Links to the programs are below.

 

Card Cat

 

RAMWerks

 

 

 

 

CVT
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Our forum colleague

Our forum colleague skate323k137 also has a Laser 128 (you can see it in this post). If you PM him, I am sure he will find the time to give Card Cat and RAMWerks a try on his machine.

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Thanks for the lead. Looks

Thanks for the lead. Looks like he hasn't been active in a little over 5 months, but I'll give a PM a try.

 

 

Henry said using MAME he was able to duplicate the first bank failure with RAMWerks, but only when using ROM 6 or 6.1. I'm running 4.5, as 6/6.1 seems to have broken Smartport and even "dumb" 3.5 drives. My concern is MAME maybe isn't exactly emulating the hardware correctly, they may have just hooked up a clone of the IIc to the laser ROM and called it a day. And there could be some slight hardware differences. 

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