My IIGS MicroDrive/Turbo IDE Controller arrived from GSE-Reactive. What an amazing device. I quickly discovered CiderPress and used it to load the card up with all sorts of goodies. Truly amazing, especially when paired with a Transwarp GS.
At first I couldn't figure out why some applications would randomly crash. I would later discover, after nearly going mad, that whenever a card was piggybacked on the CV Tech GS Memory Card, or whenever the card was jumpered to use more than 2MB of RAM, random memory corruption would result in the upper 2MB of RAM on the card. Ugh. For now, I'm working around it by disabling the latter 2MB. For the longer term, I was able to locate a GS Sauce card with 4MB. Super-GS will stay around 5MB of RAM it seems. I was just glad the problem wasn't in any of the more fancy/expensive expansion cards. By the way, Wolf 3D is not only fun, it's the best way to quickly expose any memory problems in the GS.
Also, the PC Transporter card arrived, although I really can't test it (or the Video Overlay Card) yet until I get the RGB-to-SCART cable, let's hope that's shortly. That leaves just one useable slot left, and I'm saving it for the Uthernet card, and finally the guts of the GS will be complete. It's also getting a nice set of speakers soon. I'll photograph the whole mess when it's done.
I also found time to debug my first few hundred lines of GS assembly code to arise from this project. TaskMaster wasn't returning any events because I wasn't initializing the event mask properly. These things get easier to figure out when you can debug a program by randomly inserting BRK's, and only wait 2 seconds for the super-fast emulator to reboot into the development environment.
One more thing before I forget, the Belkin F1D080 speaks a newer ADB mouse protocol than the IIGS does, making mouse control erratic to say the least, so a real ADB mouse has to be plugged into its 'spare' ADB port. The PS/2 keyboard is still useable enough though. I suspect someone could patch the ADB tools on the IIGS to permit compatibility with the newer mouse protocol, but who knows.
This week, I should get the video cable, Transwarp modding accessories, and a couple more manuals. Who knows what kinda stuff I can blow up. Best case scenario, my development environment is all ready to go by this weekend, and I can start showing off some of my work.
-Chris