Denial

I've got one of those 5-slot cartridge expander boards with 5 switches and reset. This was marketed as HesWare HES Card. Circuit board is Rev B.

My question is the switches don't seem to do much, and I'm wondering why that is? I mean when I turn "off" the switch they don't seem to fully cut off their respective cartridge port.

For example, a RAM expander may still work fine and not be disabled as one would intend. Cartridge games may still autostart , but lock up into the game.

Is that typical behavior for these cartridge port expanders with switches? Are they not truly on/off as would be assumed by their design?

rmelick wrote:Is that typical behavior for these cartridge port expanders with switches? Are they not truly on/off as would be assumed by their design?

Yep. I have no experience with expanders for the VIC-20 but a lot with those for the C64. Cartridges can act on various signals. And some don't even need the ones which can be interrupted by switches and therefore cannot be disabled at all. Others act only partly on those interrupted signals. From these you can expect weird behaviour like seemingly being disabled but messing up the behaviour of others.
I hope this helped a bit.

I have the same expander, and at first had similar issues that you write about. I think it might be just dirty contacts on the ports. Try plugging and unplugging the carts several times and see if they work better. I haven't had any problems with mine since I did that. Currently I have the following carts plugged into mine:

Avenger
3k super expander
8k memory expander
Omega Race
The Count

I can switch between them with no problems. I have started to turn the computer off when I switch, I think it works better that way.