Jens Shoenfeld's anwer to the Apollo petition

[spirantho]

My Apollo 2030 is great - but if I change anything at all then it becomes very unreliable. It took me ages to realise that the SCSI on it was actually working, because it was so strange, and if I add a second RAM stick to it it just crashes all over the place.
However, with one RAM chip and an occasional SCSI zip drive, it's now working really well.

[spirantho]

I have to say that using EDO these days would be crazy. The reason for using soldered on SDRAM is fairly obvious - cost. It's probably cheaper to stick 64MB RAM on the thing these days than it would be to fit a socket! That and it'll be a lot more reliable, and take a lot less room, and far faster than EDO.
As for SDRAM causing compatibility... that doesn't make much sense. I suspect the issue there is something different which could be fixed by a firmware upgrade.
I can't say I've seen many problems myself, actually.. and I looked on Google too. Do you have links? (Not trolling or criticising, I'm genuinely interested)

[spirantho]

I suspect that like anything else, certain models are better than others. I know my 2030 is dodgy but once you've set it up right is great.... you'll probably find that things like the 1230 are great but the 630 isn't.

Whatever, Jens does know what he's talking about. You don't design that much quality hardware without knowing your DMAs from your PIOs.