Ancient Buddha - EPROM Upgrade not working

Crashedfiesta · Sep 26th 2022

Hi,

I recently acquired an A2000 with a Buddha IDE card from 1997. It works with IDE hard disks but I'd like to use a CF adaptor so I managed to find the latest ROM. Fortunately, I have some spare 27C256s and a DataMan S4 EPROM writer (and a Samsung phone sanitiser to wipe EPROMs ).

I've erased the original EPROM and then written the latest ROM to it but I have problems. Even with the original IDE hard disk installed I get either a 'volume is not a DOS disk' or 'volume has a checksum error at XXXXXX'. If I boot from Install 3.1 (I have KS 3.1) then running HDToolBox shows no devices - it doesn't scan the bus like I'd expect. When exiting HDToolBox the application gurus. Exactly the same happens with the CF adaptor I have and any of the variety of CF cards I have.

I managed to erase and write the original ROM back to the same EPROM and got it back to the state it was in at the beginning with the old and noisy hard disk working (phew - always backup). Then I tried to write the latest ROM to another blank 27C256 EPROM just to check it wasn't a bad write, but I get the same results.

I realise that this Buddha card is really old but a thread somewhere on here says that the ROM should work on all Buddha cards, even the pre-Flash ones. Any ideas? Is there something in the writing of the EPROM I need to think about (byte swap etc)?

Cheers,

Crashed.

Jens · Sep 26th 2022

Quote from Crashedfiesta

I realise that this Buddha card is really old but a thread somewhere on here says that the ROM should work on all Buddha cards, even the pre-Flash ones. Any ideas? Is there something in the writing of the EPROM I need to think about (byte swap etc)?

To be honest, I have never tried to use the ROM image on the 1997 (green) Buddha boards. The one and only reason I had to say that it should work is that the IO mapping is the same for all Buddha controllers, but thinking of it now, there are small differences that the ROM does not take care of:

1) it's an Eprom, not an EEPROM, so saving settings (such as wait time for bus scanning) does not work.

2) the "swap upper and lower half of the EEPROM" function that I have introduced with the 1998 "flash" version of the Buddha is not there on the 1997 version, so the lower 2k of the Eprom can never be seen. Not sure if the latest ROM uses that function, but it's a likely candidate for storing the settings.

3) the 1997 version still has a speed setting for compatibility with extremely old AT-bus drives. This defaults to the slowest setting, which may be incompatible with up-to-date cards. This is the most likely reason why you're seeing the read/write errors.

Sorry for not thinking about this earlier. The best ROM version for the 1997 version is obviously the one from the "ebfinal.lha" archive (see Wiki). If you want to use a CF card, it will either have to be an industrial one, or one that is connected through one of our "TrueIDE" adapters, sadly out of stock at the moment (and I can't say when we'll make this again).

Crashedfiesta · Sep 26th 2022

Hi Jens,

Thanks for the quick response. You probably saved me a lot of time trying to make something work that never would! 😁

I only have one industrial CF which is pretty small but I might have a go with the 'ebfinal' ROM just to see if it'll work.

And it's a good excuse to buy some newer hardware. 🙂

Thanks again!

Crashed.