exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Got the IDE test program running and will leave it for a couple of hours with one of my older 2gb cards.

But before I did that I tried booting with the Diag cart in and one of the dodgy Chinese cards. No joy with booting to the cart.

What I did notice at first is that /halt was low but /reset was high. After pressing the reset switch a couple of times /halt now goes high but still no boot or anything from the serial port.

Voltage measured on both pins was 4.93vdc.

Just to verify, I removed the Chinese card and everything booted fine first time.

Only thing different with my Mega to standard is that it's hot a 1mb to 4mb upgraded and a second cap in parallel on the reset line to slow the reset operation just slightly.

Remove this resistor see what happens...

Lifted 1 end of the resistor and now the Mega boots and the CF is detected in HDDriver etc.

I partitioned it and it seems to run ok but when trying to boot I get 3 bombs. No time ATM as I'm in the middle of decorating the lounge but will retry partitioning and formatting again later.

Looking good so far exxos, well done.

PhilC wrote: 29 Apr 2019 15:16 Lifted 1 end of the resistor and now the Mega boots and the CF is detected in HDDriver etc.

I partitioned it and it seems to run ok but when trying to boot I get 3 bombs. No time ATM as I'm in the middle of decorating the lounge but will retry partitioning and formatting again later.

I just started looking at this literally just :lol:

What seems to be up with that with that card you sent me, it's outputting 3.3V onto the reset line (which is odd in itself as the card is running from 5V) , and for some reason it is just simply preventing the Atari from coming out of reset. A SanDisk cards does not do this, there is no voltage pull up at all on it..

So what I have done is replace that resistor with a diode (4148) and put a pull-up resistor to 5V..


So now that problem card, and the good cards should boot and have no issues...

I will try to partition it, but as this seems to be acting up on the PC, I think the card is just simply bad.. But the least we managed to find a small bug in all this :thumbup:

Well I did tell you I'd do my best to break it :D

Will try all 3 cards later and with the diode and pullups if it's still working for you in a bit.

#IhatePainting

PhilC wrote: 29 Apr 2019 15:42 Well I did tell you I'd do my best to break it :D

:bravo:

Your card is now currently formatting... :ball:

I am weak.

I had to purchase HDDRIVER.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 29 Apr 2019 16:11 I am weak.

I had to purchase HDDRIVER.

:bravo:

2 hours then to format.. think it was 4GB ? Anyways, its doing sector test now in HD10.. :D

exxos wrote: 29 Apr 2019 18:02 2 hours then to format.. think it was 4GB ? Anyways, its doing sector test now in HD10.. :D

Looks like we have solved one issue then. Odd that its outputting 3.3v.

Will update schematic to reflect findings and patch.