Verschlimmbessern

I guess verschlimmbessern is one of those German words most non-native speakers have not heard about. It's in the Duden, so it's an official word.

*lecturemode* Actually, it is an oxymoron, two words that are opposite of each other combined in one. The prefix ver- indicates that something is changing. The two words are verbessern, to make something better and verschlimmern, to make something worse. So, verschlimmbessern means making a thing worse by trying to make it better. *lecturemodeoff*

Two or three weeks ago the board worked pretty well, so I said I would have the 20 prototypes of my AppleIISd board ready by now. Unfortunately I don't. By trying to add features like a flag for initialization and support for multiple partitions I made things worse and I don't have a working board yet.

The trouble is that I can boot the board about every third time on the IIe. It either hangs at the ProDOS bootscreen, says "Unable to load ProDOS" or does not boot at all and hangs on either initialization of the card or loading block 0. Sometimes, there are some random characters in the text on the screen. The reason could be bad connectors, bad RAM, errors while reading from the card or faulty data on the card. Probably a combination of all of them. My IIe may have bad slot connectors, because it works better in some slots. I tested the RAM and it tested fine, but you can't be too sure on a  34 year old computer. Maybe there are glitches in reading data from the card, but the code from block 0 seems to work, most of the time. The only thing I can rule out for sure is faulty data on the card, because the behavior does not change when I re-flash the card.

Since last week I am the proud owner of a IIgs, ROM 01. My board is much more stable in that: it always says "Unable to load ProDOS". I think I can rule out the slots and the RAM on that one. But I haven't had not much time to test it.

I still don't know, why the card does not work  at all when a Z80 board is present. Maybe the Z80 does something funny on the bus, but it shouldn't when it not active. However, all three of my Z80 boards do not work in the IIgs at all.

I hope I get over this verschlimmbessern streak, soon. 😩

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