exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

@Oldskool @agranlund
What type of adapter/hard disk do you use with Raven?

Ide to cf card. Very simple thingie.

At first used one that looked similar to the one you posted @luciodra , but a version with male connector and a short cable.
The female<->female cable came from AmigaKit. I'm unsure where the adapter came from but it's likely it came from Amigakit too.

After that, and as another temporary stop-gap, I used a 44->40 pin adapter, with a 40pin CF adapter directly plugged into it.
Both from ebay, and the entire contraption modified slightly to get rid of power cables.
The 44->40pin adapter was keyed, but the male header on my motherboard is not, so I had to punch a hole in the adapter at the key pin.

IMG_3169.jpg	IMG_3170.jpg

And now, in the final configuration with everything in the case I still use an identical 44->40pin adapter, but connected with cable to a 40pin CF adapter on PCI bracket (also from ebay). This was the goal all along in order to have CF-card access from the back of the computer.

One CF card I used was 4GB and came from Amigakit. The current card I'm using is 16GB and came with the Vampire V4SA.
I think both were Sandisk brands but I'm not 100% sure.

IMG_3166.jpg	IMG_3167.jpg

luciodra wrote: 16 Nov 2024 17:35 ISmall update: with the 40 GB IDE hard disk of my Mac Mini, formatted MSDOS, Raven now boots, only I don't see any disk. The hard disk motor can be heard...

I bet read/write timing might be too aggressive for a normal HDD.
That stuff can be improved for sure, delays are hardcoded and doesn't (yet) respect the /RDY signal.
The signals are routed and it should just be a matter of logic in the ATFs, but it's one of those many things still in some kind of wip status.
(Ie; I moved on to more fun things once my CF card was up and running, and haven't revisited it since)

There should actually be an old Mac Mini ATA drive hiding somewhere around here.. but I wouldn't hold my breath getting inspiration testing and trying to get it working at the moment :)

agranlund wrote: 17 Nov 2024 11:56 I bet read/write timing might be too aggressive for a normal HDD.
That stuff can be improved for sure, delays are hardcoded and doesn't (yet) respect the /RDY signal.
The signals are routed and it should just be a matter of logic in the ATFs, but it's one of those many things still in some kind of wip status.
(Ie; I moved on to more fun things once my CF card was up and running, and haven't revisited it since)

There should actually be an old Mac Mini ATA drive hiding somewhere around here.. but I wouldn't hold my breath getting inspiration testing and trying to get it working at the moment :)

I found this combination that seems to work. The CF-Ide adapters don't work for me with several CFs, while the SD-de adapter works with an SD (one Gb) the others don't, but it probably depends on the maximum size of the partition, the FS and some other parameters.
Thanks also @Oldskool

Yes.👍
Most cf worked for me. Just had better luck maybe.
Must install a battery now. Did not test the clock yet (your picture reminded me).

Oldskool wrote: 17 Nov 2024 13:39 Yes.👍
Most cf worked for me. Just had better luck maybe.
Must install a battery now. Did not test the clock yet (your picture reminded me).

What type of formatting did you use?

Used minitool partition wizard to create a fat16 partition on a windows computer.
Boot partition can be relative small.
Thats the nice thing about emutos. You can just use fat16. The rest you can format fat32 or so and use with mint.

I have a mountain of material but almost all of it is incompatible. With CF-ide without CF it boots, with CF (formatted fat16 or fat32) everything crashes without even a message. With the SD-IDE it always boots with or without a card. With the 1 GB SD it works well, with the 8 GB one it shows the disk, with the others nothing appears.
Something just doesn't want to go...

Congrats on getting to the desktop! That's a pretty good milestone :)

With the 1 GB SD it works well, with the 8 GB one it shows the disk, with the others nothing appears.

I apologise in advance if this is a silly question, but did you partition those larger SD cards or just formatted them to FAT16 as-is?
According to EmuTOS's fat16 documentation it claims to support up to 1GB Atari FAT16 partitions and 2GB MS-DOS FAT16 partitions.
Out of old habits from the ST I've always made the fat16 boot partition 255 MB and never felt the need to explore the edge of those limits.

I'm not sure if all your partitions have to be primary partitions but I'd certainly make the C drive one at least.
(I only have four partitions on my card so I just made them all primary and haven't had a reason to investigate what EmuTOS/Mint supports in terms of primary vs secondary partitions)

Perhaps the serial log would shed some light on the situation for that larger card? Be sure to increase receive buffer size in CoolTerm so it includes the stuff at the start and not just the last bit of logging which we aren't so interested in.

With CF-ide without CF it boots, with CF (formatted fat16 or fat32) everything crashes without even a message.

This I'm not sure I have any good ideas on. From the crash message in the log you posted before it crashed as soon as interrupts where enabled, by getting a corrupt result when asking the MFP for the number. This happens very early in EmuTOS startup, and before it has even attempted to talk to any disk devices.

That interrupt number goes over a databus which is shared with the IDE interface so my lead would be that the CF card is on the bus causing collision.
Either by getting bad control signals for some reason, telling it to get on the bus even though it shouldn't. Or by some kind of mechanical issue causing one of the CF's non-data signals to short onto the databus.