I've finally gotten around to trying out my CFFA board in my Rom 3 IIGS. Bought a new 256MB Sandisk CF card for it. It's in slot 7 along with an Apple SSC in slot 2 and a 1MB memory expansion card. Note that I don't have Dave Lyon's driver loaded, this is all with the native firmware with default settings.
Before installing it, things worked fine. I could boot GS/OS 6.0.1 from floppy and run the two whole games that I own at the moment - Neuromancer and Keef the Thief - with no issues. Now that the CFFA is in I'm having some odd issues I'm hoping to get some help with here.
With the card installed and first booting up, I was prompted to format the four new "drives" that showed up - .DEV2 thru .DEV5, IIRC. This went fine. Booted from the GS/OS Install disk and did a custom install to the first drive which seemed to go fine. After booting from the new OS install on the CFFA I've seen the following:
* Random crashes during booting
* Random crashes when working with the new drives
* One boot, the Finder wouldn't run as it declared there wasn't enough memory for it
* After starting Keef (just to the initial copy protection screen) and exiting, the OS declared that .DEV5 was "damaged" and needed to be Initialized or Ejected. When I "ejected" it and then rebooted, it was fine
The other odd thing I'm seeing is a sort of "video corruption" when booting from the card. There are blank (black) chunks missing from the GS/OS loading screen and from the Desktop when I get all the way in. The four hard-drive icons will have chunks missing from them and the menu text will have "artifacts". It's hard to explain, and will change from boot to boot, but it is pretty consistant. When I go back and boot from the GS/OS floppies, these artifacts are not present.
One last odd thing is with the behaviour of Keef. It allows a hard-drive install and I went thru the process of doing that - gettting all of the required files onto one of the drives. It launched fine and I went thru the (rather painful) copy protection to get into the game. The menus came up fine, which wrap around the screen but there's a box in the upper left-hand corner that displays the art - what you see what's in front of you. It never displayed anything there, I got stuck with an hourglass cursor and eventually had to restart the machine. It runs fine directly from the floppies.
So, is there something I can try to rectify this? Put the card in another slot? Pull the SCC? I stayed up waaay too late last night futzing with this and I really don't want to do that again! Thanks.
-craig