ACA1233n-40 Maprom Issue

rabidgerry · Sep 27th 2019

Is there any particular reason that I had to re-register my email address and username again to sign into this support forum and also create the thread I started from scratch? This a link to the original and it says the page cannot be found anymore?

Briefly my issue before was I could not change kickstart in maprom and use left mouse button to bypass the acatool in startup sequence so I had to comment it out manually and change the rom in the tool again. But then encountered the issue of my cf card not loading from cold boot and having to soft reset once the kickstart screen loaded up in order for my CF card to load. I got some advice below.

Jens · Sep 27th 2019, 8:14 am

(Quote from rabidgerry)

Your description sounds like the CF card does not come up fast enough to be seen by the system. This is a decade-old problem of the Amiga and has been semi-solved by cutting the reset line of the IDE port, so the card/harddrive generate their own reset timing and come up a bit faster than when being kept in reset by the Amiga for a slightly longer time.

I call this "semi-solved" because it's not a nice solution. The original Kickstart 3.1 extends the wait-time for mass-storage devices to 30 seconds, giving harddrives plenty of time to spin up. What you may have found online are hacks, maybe not original ROMs. I suggest to go for the real thing instead of downloading from dubious sources: Get yourself the latest version of Kickstart and OS, version 3.1.4 from Hyperion, the official maintainers of the classic Amiga OS.

So the maprom function I am trying with other versions of kickstart and it is not picking them up, do I need to name the kickstart in a specific way for maprom to pickup the rom properly and save it into memory?

Jens · Sep 28th 2019

Quote from rabidgerry

Is there any particular reason that I had to re-register my email address and username again to sign into this support forum and also create the thread I started from scratch?

Database hickup - please see news. We've lost everything between september 24th and the morning of the 27th.

Quote from rabidgerry

So the maprom function I am trying with other versions of kickstart and it is not picking them up, do I need to name the kickstart in a specific way for maprom to pickup the rom properly and save it into memory?

ACAtool does a plausibility check for the ROM file you're giving it: If it's not exactly a multiple of 256k, it's not used. I remember you've uploaded pictures of a drawer with smaller (5k-ish) files that have nothing to do with the Kickstart binary. Those won't work if used in place of the ROMs.

rabidgerry · Sep 29th 2019

My apologies, I didn't realise there was a loss of data. Explains it all.

Ok so more developments and quite simply, I selected the original 3.1rom I had at the very beginning, mapped it using maprom feature in ACATool and tried my second hard drive instead of the other one I used first.

The alternative hard drive loaded no problem both on cold boot and soft reset. So this could be a card brand issue.

I have created another new hard drive literally just to test with the Maprom function so I will get back with the results from that.

I have a few questions if you don't mind answering them I would appreciate it:

1) What kind of benefits does the Maprom function have on the entire system, where would I see improvements?

2)What is vbrMOVE and how might it be useful to me?

Any information would be appreciated - thanks.

Jens · Sep 30th 2019

Quote from rabidgerry

1) What kind of benefits does the Maprom function have on the entire system, where would I see improvements?

MapROM moves the contents of the physical ROM or a file in place of that physical ROM. The actual hardware where it's stored is the fast, burst-capable memory on the accelerator. You will see considerable speedup with this feature enabled.

Quote from rabidgerry

2)What is vbrMOVE and how might it be useful to me?

This is yet another move of resources from slow memory to fast memory. In this case, it's the IRQ vectors that are moved into fastmem, which is a lot faster than any mainboard resource that the A1200 has. The speedup is not as noticable as with MapROM, but it won't hurt either

rabidgerry · Oct 1st 2019

Jens thank you for explaining that to me. I have enabled vbrMOVE now.

Now a little off topic, I hope you don't mind?

I understand the capabilities of the card in a more basic sense, being able to turn the processor off and using the A1200 stock processor for example and changing speeds of the 030, however I'm not quite sure about the options in the actual GUI and what they mean?

Could you tell me what each option does

With FastMem (this is everything on I think including fastmem and 030)

Fast No C0 Mem

Only C0 Mem

No FastMem

And do I enable cache and burst in SYSINFO?

Very grateful for all your help.

Jens · Oct 2nd 2019

Quote from rabidgerry

Could you tell me what each option does

With FastMem (this is everything on I think including fastmem and 030)

Fast No C0 Mem

Only C0 Mem

No FastMem

Display More

The card can not only switch off the 030 and let the 68ec020 CPU of the A1200 work, but it can still provide memory to that processor in various places. This is a "first" on the world of A1200 accelerators.

"Verious places" means that the memory is mapped into the limited 16MByte address space that the 68ec020 has: The Z2 space, which is 8MBytes in size (starting at 0x20.0000) , and the so-called "trapdoor memory space", 1MByte starting from 0xc0.0000. The "trapdoor memory" is called like that because it stems from the trapdoor memory expansion of the A500. Some games and demos just take this chunk of memory for granted, so they don't work on the A1200. Your compatibility goes up considerably just because memory is located there.

These fastmem options even change if you require the PCMCIA to remain active and you have Kickstart 3.1: The Z2 memory chunk is then reduced to 4MByte in order to keep space for a PCMCIA S-Ram card.

Today, most software will work with memory in any space. If you have WHDload installed, you don't need to know, as the patches are mostly done in order to make way for proper memory allocating, replacing the "hard-hacked" memory and disk-routines of games that were standard back in the days. However, I felt that these features had to go into the card, because I don't want to give the user a reason to remove it just for trying a piece of software that does not work. The connectors can stand some wear, but they of course don't last forever if they are mecahnically loaded on a regular basis.