Bluemeanie's Retro Computing

 Thanks to the fact that I could (luckily) continue working through the past year, I haven't had much time at all to do work on the AppleIISd and people have been nagging me to support non-65C02 models as well. In fact, when working from home, I wasn't in the mood to do work on personal projects at all when I've been doing professional work in the same room on the same computer the whole day long. In a brief moment of being inspired, I managed to find a bug that's been haunting me since I introduced the new SMD board design (see my last post on the AppleIISd). The problem was that despite the manufacturers claim for having a power-up write protection, the first byte of the now soldered EEPROM would be erased frequently causing the card to stop working. My manufacturing partner and I did hundreds of On/Off switching tests, monitoring power and data lines. We didn't find anything that would lead us to a solution. I reviewed the VHDL for the CPLD over and over again an