Falcon bizarre floppy problem

[Steve]

Nvram wouldn't cause any of the issues you're experiencing, that mainly stores on-boot video mode configuration and time. My bets are on your IDE to SD adaptor being incompatible.

[Badwolf]

it's useful to know that the problems affecting the two filesystems are probably separate.

From what you said it sounds like the floppy (controller rather than the actual device) is struggling which causes either problems on the bus or ends up with you copying erroneous data. Eg. perhaps the first 512 bytes are fine, but the rest are nonsense -- some kind of effect like that.

This does make sense in terms of the symptoms - some files (not all) seem to be corrupt on the IDE drive, but moving them about appears OK, whereas on the floppy there doesn't seem to be any file corruption but bits drop off the directory tree if it gets deeper than one level of folders {I think}.

Easy thing you could try is to undo the clock patch for the SDMA branch of the clock line (also, if you have an FPU installed, you could try without it -- they share a clock line). If it's a 1.1 as described then all you'd need to do is remove the fly lead to R221 and bridge that resistor's pads again.

I think I could possible copy files one at a time to the IDE drive, and small files on there don't seem to get corrupted (otherwise, how could the ICD driver work at all?). So getting NetUSBee going in a hacky sort of way is still a possibility.

You only need that one 50kB file to get NetUSB working and bypass the floppy entierly after that.

The NVRAM will be dead. If the machine boots at all don't worry about it -- you'll simply have no real time clock and you'll probably be booting up in ST LOW, US English mode.

BW

[smoore100]

I was using an SD card initially but swapped over to CF, can't remember why but there must have been a reason!

The SD card solution did work for me though, I've still got the device if you want to give it a try before spending money on the CF stuff - although from memory it's pretty cheap to pick up what you need from the store here.

Many thanks,

Simon

[jms2]

This is all really helpful, thanks everyone. I've got a lot to go away and test there, and it'll take me a while to do it, but I will report back!

[SteveBagley]

I vaguely remember when I got my Falcon (17 years ago) that the IDE drive in the machine was dead, and that it caused floppy drive issues until I removed it, so I'd be tempted to try your machine with the IDE to SD adapter completely removed before removing the clock patch as it is a much less drastic solution. :) You should be able to check the floppy is working correctly with any PC floppy -- double clicking on a text file will display it to the screen without additional software.

The IDE and Floppy share the same interrupt to the MFP via a NOT gate and an AND gate, so if something is holding the IDE interrupt line high, then the floppy (and SCSI) interrupts will never reach the MFP…

Steve

[jms2]

I have tried it with the IDE drive disconnected Steve. The floppy drive seems not entirely fault free, but I want to see if I can run Falcon-adapted games. If I can, it's fairly good evidence that the floppy is OK; if not, it suggests bigger problems.

Assuming this machine must at one time have worked better than it does now, it makes me wonder whether the clock issue along can be the cause - I wonder whether ageing caps on the mainboard might be a factor as well. I'm not going to start changing anything for now, but it would be interesting to know whether there are any "usual suspects".

Incidentally, regarding NVRAM, yes with the IDE card disconnected the machine boots into a very low resolution mode. If connected, it remembers the high res settings though, which again shows the IDE card is not completely dead.

[jms2]

I have been doing some testing, and have quite a bit to report - including some good news for once! :D

So... Test 1, IDE drive disconnected, Gotek connected - can I load Falcon-specific games and copy between discs?

To do this test I created two DOS-format 1.44MB images using WinImage on the PC. One was blank, the other contained the only game I have been able to get running reliably (Pac Them), 3D Pool (a nice small game, and its a version which has been hacked to work on the Falcon), and Xenon 2 (also a hacked version).

Pac Them and 3D pool load OK. I thought 3D Pool had frozen because I couldn't move the pointer or do anything, but I think maybe it requires a joystick.

Xenon 2 seemed to load fine up to a point, but then didn't progress any further. At the time I thought it had crashed, but maybe it just needs a joystick.

I tried reading some text files within Xenon 2. I found that the text rendered oddly - the first line was OK, but then the second line was plotted vertically down the right hand side of the screen. Every time I clicked to display more, the same thing happened. Is this something to do with incompatible newline characters or something?

I was able to copy from A: to B: as well, although I tried doing this with one game because even with Gotek, disc swapping is a bit of a faff.

Overall then, this seemed to work reasonably OK.

[jms2]

Test 2 - reinstall IDE drive, plug in NetUSB, try using UIPtool

I have to thank Badwolf for suggesting I use UIPtool, because it's excellent! I loaded the software from the Gotek and it basically worked perfectly. I was able to upload a few Falcon-only games via the network, and they seem to work OK. Again, the main stumbling block is that the small number I've tried seem to require a joystick.

I only found one "problem" with UIPtool, but it might just be me using it wrong. I tried downloading files back from the Falcon onto my PC, by dragging from the browser window. This appeared to work OK, but the resultant file is only 1k long, every time. It displays the correct file size in the browser window. It does this with every file (whether put there using UIPtool or via the floppy/Gotek).

So I think I'm narrowing down the problem to being specifically related to file transfers from the floppy/Gotek to the IDE drive. If this is the case, and if I can upload everything I need via UIPtool, I might decide not to worry about trying to fix the problem - at least not straight away. I would still be very interested in anyone's thoughts as to what might be going on though.

[smoore100]

Test 2 - reinstall IDE drive, plug in NetUSB, try using UIPtool

I have to thank Badwolf for suggesting I use UIPtool, because it's excellent! I loaded the software from the Gotek and it basically worked perfectly. I was able to upload a few Falcon-only games via the network, and they seem to work OK. Again, the main stumbling block is that the small number I've tried seem to require a joystick.

I only found one "problem" with UIPtool, but it might just be me using it wrong. I tried downloading files back from the Falcon onto my PC, by dragging from the browser window. This appeared to work OK, but the resultant file is only 1k long, every time. It displays the correct file size in the browser window. It does this with every file (whether put there using UIPtool or via the floppy/Gotek).

So I think I'm narrowing down the problem to being specifically related to file transfers from the floppy/Gotek to the IDE drive. If this is the case, and if I can upload everything I need via UIPtool, I might decide not to worry about trying to fix the problem - at least not straight away. I would still be very interested in anyone's thoughts as to what might be going on though.

Right mouse button is the same (I think) as pressing joystick fire so might help you get further in your games testing?

[jms2]

Right mouse button is the same (I think) as pressing joystick fire so might help you get further in your games testing?

Aha, thanks. I'd noticed that, but on the games I tried it didn't seem to help (and I couldn't move the pointer/highlight). I have now uploaded dozens for testing! :D

I did encounter further symptoms of floppy problems though. In preparing to upload all those games, I deleted a few things on the hard disc and then went to load UIPtool from the Gotek. At this point I got the dreaded "disc contents may be damaged", even though I hadn't accessed the floppy at all until that point. I had to reboot the machine before I could get the floppy to work. At that point I was able to successfully copy UIPtool onto the IDE drive.