Well, since you already write that you are using 3.0 kickstart ROMs with 3.1, the “mystery” is solved - as Thomas mentioned above, it only works by luck because of a bug, and chances are high that if anything tries to fill up those 8MB of RAM, the system will crash. If you remove one simm, 3.2 kickstarts (and 3.1) will work. An option is to burn custom 3.2 kickstart ROMs with card.resource (iirc) from 3.1.4 kickstart, that miraculously managed to re-introduce the bug from 3.0. You could also try to install 3.2 kickstarts and the load card.resource from 3.1.4 or 3.0 using LoadModule when you need pcmcia. But with all these “working” solutions, you run the risk of random crashes should something try to actually use all that ram (of which quite a few bytes of address space is pointing to the pcmcia rather than actual ram).
Modern RAM cards typically has reset options to switch between 4 or 8 MB of fast ram, so that we only boot to 4MB when we know we’ll be needing pcmcia. Like on one a600 I got, where I do the opposite, boot with 4MB fast RAM by default and only press ctrl-a-a a liitle extra long to get 8MB just occasionally when needed.
This is the most removed I've ever felt from the Amiga community. I now realize that I have neither the knowledge, nor the equipment (and in some cases, the software) to do pretty much any of the steps you've mentioned in your reply. I never realized getting the PCMCIA slot to work on the 1200 was such an absolute crap shoot, and that it was blind, stupid luck that I got a machine where it just miraculously worked.
As for Workbench 3.2, it's staying off my 1200. I give up. I've had enough. Another $50 that I shouldn't have spent gone right down the crapper. And now that my faulty hard drive is more sensitive than a sunburned back, the last piece of the karma pie is that I'll reformat it, reinstall WB3.1, and have the card slot not work again for literally no reason. But, I'm being defeatist. Tomorrow is another day, and all that.
