I received the 65c02 and ROMXe yesterday, so this morning I installed them.

I started out replacing the cpu. I removed the SpeedDemon, but left the Disk II controller in Slot 7. The Yellowstone card was already out of the computer. Didn't have too much trouble removing the cpu. There were some troubling sounds as 40 years worth of stiction was overcome, but it came out nicely with no bent pins. Socket looked clean, so I didn't do any Deoxit or anything.

Booted the machine to make sure the cpu worked before I did anything with the ROMs. Came up normally, so I went ahead with replacing the ROMs.

Similarly, the two 8K ROM chips came out without any trouble. The video ROM was harder because it's near the keyboard and I hadn't removed the case, so there was no place to really get much leverage with the front part of the chip. Bent a couple of pins getting it out, but they didn't break and straightened out easily.

I have two USB-powered LED desk lamps on the work bench, so I had good light as I aligned the pins with the sockets. The ROMxe is a circuit board, so it obscures much of the socket as you're getting it aligned. Patience and a good "feel" are helpful, and everything went in with no difficulty.

Next step was to boot the machine and see if it worked. Booted right into the configuration screen for the ROMx. The manual calls for launching Choplifter as a verification test. Launched fine and I had a joystick connected. Hard to play on a monochrome screen though. Saved a couple of hostages and powered down to install the SpeedDemon to see if that was compatible.

I was worried because both the ROMXe and the SpeedDemon kind of take control at boot-up to give you an opportunity to either disable the accelerator, or choose a different ROM image. I didn't know if there'd be some kind of contention conflict.

Worked just fine. The SpeedDemon grabbed control first, then the ROMXe. There's a countdown timer for the ROMXe configuration menu, which you can stop by pressing Escape; if you don't it goes through a normal boot sequence. But since the accelerator was active, the countdown timer went by in a flash. Then the computer booted normally from a floppy.

I removed the SpeedDemon and installed the Yellowstone card with the Floppy Emu attached to verify it worked with the new cpu and ROMs (didn't anticipate any problems, but best to check). Worked fine. I didn't put the Yellowstone in a higher numbered slot to see if it would automatically boot, but I'm confident that it would now with the enhanced ROMs on the motherboard.

Now was the moment of truth. Would having essentially an "enhanced" //e, albeit in a Rev A motherboard, allow the Yellowstone card to get along with the SpeedDemon?

Nope.

Same effect. Computer tries to boot from Slot 7, as intended, ProDOS splash screen appears and then we crash into the monitor.

At some other time, I'll use the monitor to examine where in memory the crash occurs and see if that offers any clues. For now, I've removed the Yellowstone card from the IIe. For the kind of recreational "programming" I'm doing, it's more fun to watch programs run fast. And since I do most of that programming sitting in the recliner on the IIc, I can just save it to floppy and take it into the garage to see how it performs at 3x speed. It's more important to have that 32MB HD capacity there, where I can swap around tools quickly, switching quickly from Program Writer to Beagle Compiler and back.

Cloudy and breezy this morning. Time to go take a walk.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:54 Wednesday, 16 October 2024