Decided to try putting a XSIMM10 in Slot 1 above the IO-expander card in my X68030 to work around the memory timings and hey, memtest now runs perfectly and I seem to be able to use the IO-Box slots too!
The CZ-6EB1 manual does state to not use this slot when the Expansion box is plugged in but I mean… Expansion memory is pretty much directly addressed without much magic so thought I’d just try things out and seems to work.
Proceeded to try jamming it full with various cards and testing things out.
This is where the fun stopped though. Turns out that while SCSI and MIDI worked fine, I could not get Nereid to work through the IO Expansion.
Nereid issues
When connected directly to the computer, Nereid happily boots up and will connect to Ethernet, but when running it through the IO Expander, it will consistently freeze with a Bus Error when loading the Ethernet driver.
Interestingly the last page of the manual does mention that a Bus Error will trigger, but I do not see these freezes when connecting to the computer directly.
Removing all other expansion cards and swapping it around in different slots does not seem to resolve the issue.
Since I do want to use the X68030 with the Nereid, this means that I currently don’t have a good way to utilize the IO box with this after all 🙁
I guess I’ll use it for some weird setup with one of my other X68000 at some point.