Date   : Wed, 27 Feb 1985 18:09:27 GMT
From   : john chapman <jchapman%watcgl.uucp@BRL-TGR.ARPA>
Subject: Re: Anyone have Lomas S-100 systems?

(extract)
> they are a competitor of Compupro. They sell S-100 boards and systems such
> as 10Mhz 8086 boards, 80286 boards, 3Mb dynamic ram boards etc and they
> support CPM/86, MSDOS 2.1 and Concurrent PC-DOS (hopefully UNIX soon).
> 
>    Recently, they came out with a 3 Mb dynamic ram board which works with a 
> 10Mhz 8086 with no wait states. More interestingly, they have a S-100 board
>                                             Sam Chin

 I have seen this board advertised but I think people should be wary about
 rushing out and buying one even though they seem like a good deal.  Last
 august I decided to add more memory to my machine and their 128k/256k
 dynamic memory board seemed like a good deal too.  However having had
 previous (bad) experiences with dynamic boards for s100 machines I was
 wary. I have a Morrow hard disk controller which does dma so I called them
 up and specifically asked - Will this board function correctly with the
 Morrow HDC-DMA (just about as close to an exact quote as I can do)?
 Answer: YES. Reality: NO.  I did not discover this immediately since
 all my other memory was static and it was not until I ran in a
  configuration where the Lomas board was being used as the target of
 the disk transfer that failure occurred.  By this time the warranty had
 expired so I just sighed and went out and bought another static ram 
 board (sound of toilet flushing).  Even now I am tempted by both the
 price of their new board and the claims about it but dynamic just
 doesn't seem to work in a generic s100/IEEE696 environment.  If
 anyone has had better experiences with dynamic memeory I would be
 pleased to know.  All the boards I know of either don't do dma
 properly or are restictricted to particular cpu, etc etc.
 
     John Chapman
 
 Once warned, twice shy, but still optimistic.