exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I tried one sd card with image of acsi harddrive volume on it, and one with standard fat32 and files.
But, I have been told that even without sdcard, acsi2stm device should blink orange led, but here it doesn't at all.

I have switch 1772 between two atari, one is atari branded one is not.
But it does not change anything.

Waiting my parcel with the resistors to do the pullup stuff.

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience and idea, that's nice.

Latest attempt.
I rebuild the firmware and I did put it in debug mode.
It appears that the device is awaiting acsi bus, I have the following message :

"-> Waiting for the ACSI bus ..."

it seems like the hardware is not talking to acsi2stm.

I'll keep tweaking firmware and looking for an hardware issue.

any idea welcome !

Out of curiosity, did you build this yourself?

I helped somebody last year with an ACSI2STM problem and the BluePill was fake.

Now his didn't work at all, but when testing it appeared to do something from the log perspective, and that was with an STE too.

Have a look here: Fake BluePill

It seems that the fakes do have varying degrees of functionality as mine kind of worked in my BlueSCSI devices.

Worth checking to see if it is a genuine BluePill.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 11 Feb 2024 10:45 Out of curiosity, did you build this yourself?

I helped somebody last year with an ACSI2STM problem and the BluePill was fake.

Now his didn't work at all, but when testing it appeared to do something from the log perspective, and that was with an STE too.

Have a look here: Fake BluePill

It seems that the fakes do have varying degrees of functionality as mine kind of worked in my BlueSCSI devices.

Worth checking to see if it is a genuine BluePill.

Hello rubber_jonnie,

No I did not build it by myself. Thanks for suggesting the idea. I have two (one blue pill and one made in factory with smd like this one ). One tested works fine with other atari ste but not this one.

I am applying the fix from Exxos on dma, 1772 and so on. I have the bus resistance to apply in the hope that'll fix dma behavior.

I notice that I have the patched motherboard revision (with the 74LS build above another one near the ram). The one that use to work with does not has this patch. I wonder if there is something there.
From the asc2stm device I notice that I do not receive the command from DMA. (so either it sends too fast or too slow ?).

Will update soon.

Did you solved the issue with ACSI2STE?

I have similar case:
1) I have ACSI2STM that works perfectly with STF.
2) When connect device to STE then I have two bombs on boot (TOS 2.06 GB, bombs shortly after mem test, no whatever message from ACSI2STM on screen).
3) I moded my STE but nothing help until now: recaped PSU, pullup data bus on WD1772, replaced buffers on ACSI port 74LS744, 74LS745, replaced SIM modules. Also checked continuity ACSI related lines on the board. Removed R9/R11 resistors from bluepill.
4) STE is perfect stable, except when connect ACSI2STM.

What I can check more?

Did you solved the issue?

I have similar case:
1) I have ACSI2STM that works perfectly with STF.
2) When connect device to STE then I have two bombs on boot (TOS 2.06 GB, bombs shortly after mem test, no whatever message from ACSI2STM on screen).
3) I moded my STE but nothing help until now: recaped PSU, pullup data bus on WD1772, replaced buffers on ACSI port 74LS744, 74LS745, replaced SIM modules. Also checked continuity ACSI related lines on the board. Removed R9/R11 resistors from bluepill.
4) STE is perfect stable, except when connect ACSI2STM.

What I can check more?

hawix wrote: 10 Oct 2024 23:26 Did you solved the issue?

I have similar case:
1) I have ACSI2STM that works perfectly with STF.
2) When connect device to STE then I have two bombs on boot (TOS 2.06 GB, bombs shortly after mem test, no whatever message from ACSI2STM on screen).
3) I moded my STE but nothing help until now: recaped PSU, pullup data bus on WD1772, replaced buffers on ACSI port 74LS744, 74LS745, replaced SIM modules. Also checked continuity ACSI related lines on the board. Removed R9/R11 resistors from bluepill.
4) STE is perfect stable, except when connect ACSI2STM.

What I can check more?

You've done a lot, there may be things you haven't done from the Mandatory Fixes so worth just a walk through to cross check. the 68HC000 CPU replacement may be something you could do quickly and cheaply though.

I've had a similar problem. I have an STE that will not work with an ACSI2STM. Tried the HC cpu, bad DMA fix PCB (with and without), it has an original drive, recapped the PSU, tried non parity RAM, changed ROM's (1.6, 1.62 and 2.06) and it just won't work. I tried two ACSI2STM and have tried both on ST multiple machines including other STE's I have and its just this one STE that won't work.

I can run a SCSI drive off the same STE or any other device, no problem. It never crashes except with the ACSI2STM. I haven't had time to look at it in a while but I will. You might be in the same camp.

Not sure is it good direction, but I have an idea to dig a bit in firmware settings.
I found quite interesting flag, see it:

ACSI_FAST_DMA: If set to 1, unroll DMA code for faster performance. Fast timings may not be compatible with some ST DMA chips. You can try values between 2 and 5 for even faster performance, but this is glitchy.

Here more info from source code:

// Push data faster in DMA transfers
// Setting to non-zero unrolls the DMA transfer code but may be less compatible
// with some ST DMA controllers.
//
// Values 1 to 5 select different algorithms, from the most conservative to the
// fastest. It seems that the STM32 has hardware glitches in some corner cases,
// and different algorithms do different tradeoffs for speed and compatibility.
// Versions 3.x used algorithm 5 (the fastest) but had known issues.
//
// Algorithms apply to STM32->ST transfers, for ST->STM32 any non-zero value
// will enable fast DMA.
#define ACSI_FAST_DMA 1

So want to try what happen when 0. Keep you updated.

I had been told that, I'll be interested to see how you go. Having another pair of STE's I wasn't that motivated.