Arrrrrrrgggg!

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

The problem is back.  OK, I am slowly cornering it.  Looks like it is a 
memory card problem.  I am no longer sure about anything since I have been 
fighting this problem for so long.

I just sat down with Bill Haynes and we are thinking about changing out to 
a modern serial link to a PCI card.  This violates my original plan to do 
everything in stuff I could code in QBasic, but so be it.

Everything I have found so far is a possible problem, but not *the* 
problem.  So the various changes I have suggested are all good to do.

The memory card was designed by Merle and he thinks differently from Bill 
and I.  So we hare agreed that it is probably easier to design a new system 
that we both understand than to figure out Merle's design that probably has 
some sort of race condition in it.

Meanwhile, I will hope that the memory cards that are now working will keep 
working until we can get a new system in place.

The PCI card would have a limited FIFO and some control program that would 
write what it receives directly to memory.  Bill has already done a similar 
project at 1000 times the bandwidth we need so it should be possible.

Software writers might consider how such a card affects their designs.

Tom Droege