I wanted to share my experience with Pretec Cards. And unless someone change
it, it could also serve as a warning for those considering to buy similar
cards.
I had two of this cards for several years now and used them with Alesys
QS-series synth, I love this old board. Both cards worked perfectly. Itıs
Pretec 8Mb Linear flash cards P/N FAD008-P .
Pretecıs site describes them as AMD D Series cards.
As I already mentioned they worked fine with QS Synth, for those who
doesnıt know QS-Series was award-winning line of synthesizers introduced at
the 90-s by Alesys, QS synths were renowned for being upgradeable via PCMCIA
ROM cards and famous for being able to use PCMCIA Flash RAM cards to load
any audio file from desktop computer thus giving one a practical way to
create custom made upgrades for itıs Sound Memory.
When I found that those cards believed to be compatible with MP2100 I
rejoiced and leapt to the opportunity to test it. At first it worked fine
but then in about a week one card suddenly became unrecognisable by Newton,
and soon the second one followed. I think both times it happened after
Newton crashed and restarted by itself, I want to underline it specifically
that it was not a hard restart, I read something about some card being
unable to handle the hard restart before the above mention happened and was
particularly cautious to avoid leaving cards in the slots during hard
restarts, although since then I only buy 12/5volt cards and can reassure
that they are safe to be always left in their slots. The thing is though
hard restart was made by Apple to be impossible to be triggered by software
operation or maloperation, soft restarts are common and unavoidable.
I was very upset by losing two 8mb cards (each cost me around $120 at the
time I bought them) particularly after the second card was messed up, cause
by that time I knew I was walking on the thin ice here and the error which
led to restart was not caused by me doing anything stupid and looked just
like evil spell cast by ³you know who².
It is not a surprise that I was ruffled even more by necessity to chose
between calling it a consolation or further predicament when I accidentally
found out that the cards are still usable by my QS Synth. The synth doesnıt
seem to notice anything wrong with it while Newton pops up ³There is a
problem with this card. (Newton cannot recognize this type of card)² error.
Can anyone explain this ?
Cheers, Denis.
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