Raspberry PI PICO ATARI ST Hard Drive Emulator (WIP)

[dad664npc]

There is a newer firmware for testing stability and performance (v1.2.0) - download from https://bbansolutions.co.uk. Suggest you try this on a test micro-sd card
I have two STe - one just would not work until I replaced the CPU for an HC variant https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/atari/store2/#0092 - now the ACSI bus works just fine

[exxos]

Cool, what does this firmware do exactly then ?

[dad664npc]

check for IO timeouts and improved write performance

[exxos]

I tested speed with V113 and V120, but the newer firmware seems slightly slower ?

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[dad664npc]

and if you run the "Combined R/W tests" -> "Both" - The write performance should be better

[exxos]

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Yep it is a bit faster.

[exxos]

@dad664npc What does it mean when the SD light is just flashing continuously about once a second ? it does this in either slot and it does not seem to find the SD card anymore I tried 2 cards as well in both slots

EDIT:

Nevermind, pressing the reset button solved it. Though powering off the ST (with pico) didn't help

EDIT2:

OK its done it again with my second SD card. So no idea whats going on there. Might be because its not partitioned yet, i'll do it on the PC and retry next.

[exxos]

It's odd as its only 1 card. Seems fine on the PC. So not sure whats going on with this one. My other SD card works fine.

I partitioned on the PC FAT16 220MB. So it shows up in HD11. But doesn't know the total size of the card. It just shows 0.00MB

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On Ultrasatan it works.

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And why the heck does HD11 intermittently switch itself to German , I'm loading from floppy and its even write protected!

[dad664npc]

@dad664npc What does it mean when the SD light is just flashing continuously about once a second ? it does this in either slot and it does not seem to find the SD card anymore I tried 2 cards as well in both slots
...

There are two reasons why the drive LED flashes once a second - the first is the HDC can not find a MBR so is unable to calculate sizes. The second is the MBR exists but is trashed so the partition sizes exceed the card size

[dad664npc]

113.JPG113-both.JPG
120.JPG120-both.JPG
Yep it is a bit faster.

Those RW values are terrible. I'd expect to be seeing around 800 KB/s for reads and around 500 KB/s for writes

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