Questions and Answers
Copyright (c) 1992 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Q: I have been having problems getting System 6.0 to recognise my 5.25" disk drive. There was no problem with System 5.0.4. What is going on?
A: The new 5.25" driver tries to be clever and notice when there are actually drives connected to your 5.25" interface by turning on the motor and looking for noise on the bus. Theoretically, no drive is so quiet that it won't return noise, so the driver can only build DIBs for drives that are actually there and not give you more devices than you have drives.
In reality, there are lots of drives out there this quiet, and so the new 5.25" driver doesn't think you have any drive connected at all. The two ways to get around the problem are to 1) use the 5.0.4 driver, or 2) always keep a formatted disk in the drives when booting or restarting GS/OS.
Engineering now accepts this as a bug and they intend to fix it.
Matt Deatherage Source: GEnie
Q: Prodos 2.0.1 keeps crashing with my RamFast. What's the problem?
A: This is caused by a mapping conflict between your RamFast and ProDOS. Both the RamFAST and Prodos are trying to map your devices which results in devices appearing twice and the crashes. The best way to cure this problem is to make a change to ProDOS which turns off its device mapping.
Perform the following patch to file P8 in the system directory with a block editor (such as ProSEL's Block Warden). Be sure to save a copy somewhere before you do the patch. Change Block 5 (of the P8 file), byte $1A3, from $A5 to $00.
Q: Why does the Zip outperform the Transwarp GS with regard to graphics performance?
A: This occurs because of the "latch-on-write" bus interface of the Zip. Put simply, the Zip hardware is capable of coprocessing a single byte write to the IIgs without slowing down the CPU, provided that the next few cycles run from cache. Of course, a two-byte write will pause the CPU until the first byte is written, but the second byte gets written in the background. This lets standard graphics code run much faster and makes MVP/MVN nearly as fast as PEA/PEI.
Todd P. Whitesal Source: Internet

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