Hi RandyP,
I was activating SW3-4 prior to reset and switching it off at different points during my testing procedures. Since it was not 100% clear to me in the Spectrum Digital docs that the only logical characteristic of the DIP was a pull-down of GPIO pin14, I wanted to see how operation was affected. My ultimate goal was to use GPIOs 15-8 to transfer a consecutive 8-bit word from a microcontroller and avoid unnecessary bit-manipulation in code, and since my results in debugging mode were not as I expected, I began to consider the possibility that SW3-4 might somehow disable GPIO pin14 - even though that seemed unlikely. This is the only reason I was toggling SW3-4.
I suspected Vista was a concerning element of our test-lab since we installed it. The libraries provided to us by our professor were installed following a procedure that required an older version of CCS and Vista or XP. Since we could only acquire Vista, that's the program we installed on a dedicated laptop for the purpose of developing with the C6713 DSK.
I have since learned a great deal about the code and libraries that support the C6713, and I am definitely considering using a different laptop and operating system and relinking all of the libraries manually. Perhaps this will allow me to use the current version of CCS.
Thank you for your recommendations.