ACA1221 causes "recoverable alert" with Amiga Game Selector

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.

    Hi

    I recently installed Amiga Game Selector by Paul Vince, and since then, I keep getting "recoverable alert" at random when starting games. It can be .exe or WHDLoad it does not matter. Two other people have the same problem as me and what we all have in common is the ACA1221 accelerator.


    What could be the problem here? Is it an ACATUNE setting in startup-sequence that needs to be taken care of? I have no flags on it, just ACATUNE as the parameter.

    That alert surely has a number - which one?


    Also, is this really an ACA1221, the one with licenses for memory/speed/Maprom and 64M physical memory? There are two successors, one with "ec" and the other with "lc" in the name, which both have 16M physical mem only.


    Also, I'd like to know if you have any patches installed (like MCP or the infamous OS-patches by a French hacker).


    Jens

    error: 0100 000C

    Task: 08002100


    Yes Aca1221 9 MB fastmem unlocked.


    Bought a million years ago from this site. I have an RTC installed. No patches no nothing that I know of. Where do I see if I have the patches?

    Quote from pellejones

    error: 0100 000C

    Task: 08002100

    That's a "Sanity check on memory list failed during AvailMem(MEMF_LARGEST)" - some program seems to be messing with the freemem list. This may happen when a chunk of memory is freed more than once - it's a software error, not an error that the ACA1221 can cause. You are looking for a software bug.


    Quote from pellejones

    Where do I see if I have the patches?

    Some people like to install all kinds of things when they come acress an "improvement". MCP is a particularly bad example of a program that you should not use, but there's a Frensh guy who has a track record of tracing through C: commands and libraries, attempting to find unused code and patching out supposedly-dead-code in order to make the files a few bytes shorter. I can neither understand the motivation, nor do I understand how he really determines that the code is never used, as the Amiga is a system without memory protection, and keeping dead code may even be a workaround for a different error.


    If you haven't actively installed any such patch, just ignore my warning, but be sceptical if you come across something that solves a problem that is most likely none.


    Jens

    This time I got this error instead: 8100 000C


    I've brought it up with Paul, lets see what he says. My guess it is an error when memory is dumped as you click on a game. It quits AGS and shuts down the mod player, then loads WHDLoad.

    Quote from Jens

    Same thing, memory freemem list is corrupt.


    Jens

    It appears that this issue only happens with the ACA1221 and not other versions of it. Aca1221lc works fine. Even with the 64MB unlocked the error happens on ACA1221.


    Are there major differences between the cards that could cause this?

    The ACA1221 has a full 68020 CPU, while the lc version has an EC020 CPU. This means that memory is at a different location, because EC020 CPUs have limited address space (16MByte instead of 4GByte that the full CPU has).


    There are quite some differences between the cards. Memory location is one, memory timing is the second (ACA1221 is not as sophisticated, runs one more wait state), ACA1221lc uses autoconfig, ACA1221 doesn't (relies on Kickstart to find the memory), but all this is not enough to cause actual corruption of the freemem list.


    If you want to see if it's a problem of the software, take an old ACA1231 card; that's most similar in terms of memory layout, memory location and amount. I'm pretty sure that it will exhibit the same problem. However, it'll also let you run Enforcer or other MMU-based debug tools that help you finding the software fault. After that's done, you'll see that the ACA1221 runs the fixed software just fine.


    Jens