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Misbehaving WildCard 2

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Ivan X

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Dec 29, 2009, 3:50:00 AM12/29/09
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I picked up a Central Point Wildcard 2. It looks identical to what's
pictured here: http://apple2info.net/hardware/wildcard2/wildcard2.htm

But rather than giving me the menu it is supposed to, it instead either
freezes the machine cold, or beeps and enters the monitor. This is on an
unenhanced //e. The person I got it from reported the same thing.

Does anyone have any idea what might be wrong? Should I reseat the chips,
etc?

Thanks,
Ivan.

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Ivan X

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Dec 29, 2009, 11:45:10 PM12/29/09
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In case this interests anyone, I fiddled with it a bit more, and discovered
two things:

1) when you press the button, it does a hard jump to $3FB, the NMI vector.
Therefore, the behavior varies depending upon what's there; when DOS 3.3 is
loaded, it beeps and enters the monitor because there's a JMP $FF65 there.
But it's obviously not very useful if the behavior isn't consistent.

2) the behavior is identical even when the main PROM is removed. I'm not
sure what to conclude from this.

I don't have a lot of knowledge about how NMI's work, so any insight here
would be welcome. Are there any known ROM dumps of the PROM?

Thanks,
Ivan.


On 12/29/09 3:50 AM, in article C75F2CE8.1930E%nor...@noreplyxyz.com, "Ivan

sicklittlemonkey

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Dec 30, 2009, 3:49:23 PM12/30/09
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On Dec 30, 5:45 pm, Ivan X <nore...@noreplyxyz.com> wrote:
> 1) when you press the button, it does a hard jump to $3FB, the NMI vector.

I've never used a Wildcard, but that sound like a problem right there.
The card should override the mainboard ROM with it's own so that the
ROM NMI vector jumps to Wilcard ROM and not $3F5.

I had a quick look at the manual.
Is the II+/IIe jumper set correctly?

Cheers,
Nick.

Ivan X

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Dec 30, 2009, 6:11:00 PM12/30/09
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Thanks for checking that out. Yes, I did remove the jumper for IIe use.

What you're saying makes sense. It does indeed seem as though the ROM is not
doing its thing, for whatever reason. I am not enough of a hardware guy to
troubleshoot it further, unfortunately; if you have any suggestions, I'm
eager to hear them.

Ivan.


On 12/30/09 3:49 PM, in article
12f0f22d-9e9e-4580...@d21g2000yqn.googlegroups.com,
"sicklittlemonkey" <nick.w...@gmail.com> wrote:

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