ecr@stars (Eric C. Rollins) (06/25/91)
Help! I have had intermittent problems with Guru 0000000B.002***** ever since I added a GVP hard drive to my A500. I have an A501 512K ram expansion (with dead clock), GVP Impact Series I A500HD (33 Meg) with 2 Meg ram installed, Dos 1.3, Kickstart 34.5, WB 34.20. I originally noted the problem running the terminal (serial port) demo program with microsoft basic. It would get guru B, even when the machine was booted with the game switch set to boot from floppies. With the HD powered off the terminal program ran fine. I reproduced this effect on another A500 at the Amiga dealer. I assumed the old program was not compatible with the additional ram. However, sometimes it works fine. Very strange. Now I am having the same problem with Aegis Spectracolor. It gets guru B about half the time when I select the Project/Video menu options. It also often fails in the animation rendering functions. Spectracolor continues to fail when I boot from floppy with the HD game switch down (+2 meg ram but no HD). I works fine with the entire HD unit powered off. So, the options seem to be 1) bad RAM. I have repeatedly run the GVP memory test program and others, it always tests fine. Question: how do you test all of a ram chip? I can test 20f9a8 - 37dd08 fine, but if I try to test 200000 - 3fffff it gurus, presumably because I have tromped on my own program or some os stuff. Can I "free up" the entire memory area to be tested? 2) bad software. Do Microsoft basic and Spectracolor have some verboten programming technique in common? 3) old Workbench? Is there a newer version than 34.20? If so, how do I install it on my hard disk? 4) bad A500(s)? I could go on about other strange hw problems, like the dead clock and 2 different copies of Dungeon Master deciding not to allow saved games on my machine... Thanks in advance for any help. Apologies in advance for all the questions that are old news. Please post replies here, as my mail is dead. --Eric