TF1260 IDE weirdness

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hamsterbasher
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2022 2:46 am

TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by hamsterbasher »

Just recently purchased a TF1260-50 for my 1D.1 board and am having issues with the card IDE. I am in contact with the seller and working with them as I am aware support has to be through the seller but that effort is frustrating and very slow going so I wanted to post on here to see if anyone may have seen something similar before or have any suggestions I could try. Seller confirmed the card was flashed with 999 firmware.

If I boot and run only off internal IDE then everything works great. Card is rock solid and I can run it for hours with no issues and pretty much every app or game I try load is behaving as I would expect, just usually much faster. Seller supplied new 3.2.1 kickstarts with EHIDE preloaded so naturally want to get the 1260 IDE working next.

When I move the CF card to that IDE it boots workbench and everything seems OK. However if I try and start any WHDLOAD game I get the info screen and then either it goes black screen and then nothing or it starts to play the game for 1-2 seconds, the screen freezes and the sound continues playing. Eventually after a while the sound dies also. Frontier is a great example where you just see the intro screen and it freezes every time.

I also noticed that if I try and reformat a drive partition in workbench the quick format will start but after 1-2 seconds the whole workbench locks up solid or the machine just reboots. Does this regardless of the partition size or block sizes I tried ... the lock or reboot is guaranteed. If I only have the internal CF connected then formats work 100%. I have tried multiple CF adapters, 5cm IDE cables and CF cards and even tried a SD adapter connect to the 1260 IDE. All behave exactly the same.

Now the very weird part. If I boot off the internal IDE CF and have all my data on that card but have a CF card in the 1260 enhanced IDE, even one with a single clean formatted partition that I never access the issues come back, for both CF cards. Running WHDLOAD off the internal card using scsi.device gives me the same display freezes and locks with formatting. If I remove the enhanced IDE CF which stops ehide.device loading then all the problems go away and the machine is stable again. It looks like it needs to have ehide.device loaded for the instability to happen regardless of the Cd being accessed.

Seller suggested it was my machine at fault so I also tried the card on my other 2B A1200 with a different power supply and once again the same issues surfaced. Both motherboards have the timing cap fixes and both have been recapped, one by me and another by the seller of that machine. Both motherboards also run my older E-Matrix 68030-50 with no issues and I have never tried to increase the speed of the 1260 beyond the stock 50Mhz. Running out of ideas on what else I can try but if anyone has any ideas please let me know.
CrazyC
Posts: 32
Joined: Sat Oct 02, 2021 10:17 am

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by CrazyC »

Just in case it is related, see my post here:
https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... =40#p74313
matt020
Posts: 292
Joined: Sun Sep 29, 2019 9:17 am
Location: West Australia

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by matt020 »

from shell or cli, type:

version ehide.device <enter>

and report back

if you have the correct version (pls dont assume it is, pls check!!) then i'll suggest a couple of workarounds...
hamsterbasher
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2022 2:46 am

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by hamsterbasher »

Hi, it responds with
ehide.device 1.1
hamsterbasher
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2022 2:46 am

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by hamsterbasher »

CrazyC wrote: Fri Apr 01, 2022 11:36 pm Just in case it is related, see my post here:
https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewt ... =40#p74313
Thank you for the link. Since I am running 3.2 on this machine and mostly troubleshooting with multiple CF cards I have kept it simple and stuck with stock standard file system and 1k block sizes. As far as I know the max transfer for SFS is always usually 0xFFFFFFFF anyhow but for a test I tried the values in your post and it didn't help. I also repartitioned the card again with PFS3 partitions with the limited max you set and tried that. While the machine did not hang now on formats - those succeeded without a lock or reboot the WHDLOAD game and demo issues still persist.

Thanks again .
matt020
Posts: 292
Joined: Sun Sep 29, 2019 9:17 am
Location: West Australia

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by matt020 »

Using process of elimination,

Can I suggest removing the 3.2 rom with ehide.device added, and use stock standard 3.1 or 3.1.4 or 3.2 roms and use "loadmodule ehide.device" and report back.
hamsterbasher
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2022 2:46 am

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by hamsterbasher »

Always happy to try more testing :-)

Swapped out the seller Roms with a standard 3.2 kickstart booting to onboard IDE and then loadmodule ehide.device. With no CF card connected to TF1260 IDE I could see that ehide.device was resident according to ShowConfig but no partitions showed it in use. Tried a few games and they all loaded fine - no issues detected at all.

Powered off and inserted a CF card on the TF1260 and rebooted. Now shows one partition in use by ehide.device. All my test WHDLOAD games all fail with freezing like before. Repeated the same test with kickstart 3.1 with same results. In all cases game files were loaded off of the internal IDE CF and these would freeze, Files loaded of TF1260 IDE would also freeze.

Also, seller said that I can check the TF1260 firmware version by using cpuspeed but I don't see how you can see that. The help only shows options related to speed setting, nothing for status. If I look in ShowConfig it shows a serial number for the board as 999 so I assume that is the firmware but curious if there is a way to tell using cpuspeed.
terriblefire
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Posts: 5368
Joined: Mon Aug 28, 2017 10:56 pm
Location: Glasgow, UK

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by terriblefire »

hamsterbasher wrote: Mon Apr 04, 2022 3:22 am Also, seller said that I can check the TF1260 firmware version by using cpuspeed but I don't see how you can see that. The help only shows options related to speed setting, nothing for status. If I look in ShowConfig it shows a serial number for the board as 999 so I assume that is the firmware but curious if there is a way to tell using cpuspeed.
CPUSpeed also prints out the serial number.
———
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matt020
Posts: 292
Joined: Sun Sep 29, 2019 9:17 am
Location: West Australia

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by matt020 »

What block size(s) are you actually using?
hamsterbasher
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Apr 01, 2022 2:46 am

Re: TF1260 IDE weirdness

Post by hamsterbasher »

I reformated all partitions using 1k block size. Let me know if I need to go smaller or larger and can try that also.
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