Date   : Wed, 20 Jun 1984 15:58:00 CDT
From   : Boebert@HI-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: Re: Softcard-serial card problem

This may or may not be relevant.  I had so many difficulties with my
older Softcard (the one that uses the Apple memory) that I trashed it in
favor of the PCPI Applicard (which I think is really neat).

The system crashed without fail when a card other than an Apple disk
controller was in a slot > 3.  Crash symptoms were random.  Crashes
**only** occurred with the > 44k versions, that is, the versions which
attempted to use the extended memory in slot 0.  So there is evidently a
bug in the BIOS in the bank-switching logic.

I wasted a lot of time chasing hardware bugs until I discovered that 44k
2.2b ran and 56k 2.2b crashed.  I tried 3.0 and it crashed too.
Microsoft's technical support consists of the logical equivalent of busy
signals.  So I upgraded to a 6mhz board with ramdisk that works.

Even if (as I assume) you are putting the board in slot 1, Microsoft's
BIOS seems buggy in this area of RAM/ROM address switching and this may
be causing the problem.  Don't expect them to fix or even acknowledge
the difficulty if you pin it down.