exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Well, the latest MAPROM_C.PRG does give quite a speed boost and the floppy works. :dualthumbup:

stephen_usher wrote: 23 May 2022 21:08 Well, the latest MAPROM_C.PRG does give quite a speed boost and the floppy works. :dualthumbup:

:bravo: :girldance: :girldance:

Hmm... Floppy formatting isn't working properly.

The format process is incredibly slow (EmuTOS 1.0) and then reports that 0 bytes are available.

Switching over to TOS 1.04 and the 68000 and the system formats fine.

Similarly, with MAPROM.PRG, formatting is fine.

MAPROM_C version 22. REV5 ST536 TOS :

FCOPYIII formats 1.88MB fine.

GEM 720K:


EMUTOS 1.1.1 - but oddly MAPROM doesn't seem to be doing anything with it now :shrug: ROM doesn't seem to get copied to alt-ram. Also oddly EMUTOS is reporting TTram in KB not MB . It might not being launched from ST536 TOS which stuff already allocated :shrug:

If you’re running the .PRG version of EmuTOS then it’s running in RAM and not ROM and hence MAPROM won’t be able to do anything, surely?

MAPROM should still enable the caches AFAIK, which is where most of the problems are. All I can say is with my setup it all works and think Anders had it working fine with EMUTOS.

I’ve just tried under TOS 2.06 and floppy formatting works. Maybe it’s a problem with EmuTOS 1.0

Steve wrote: 14 May 2022 20:21 this is the fastest recorded Frontbench score on a regular tf536...

Hmmn.. I see your 3211.. and raise with my current development firmware in "ludicrous speed" :lol:


Frontbench in TT-RAM: 4108
Frontbench in ST-RAM: 4066 (*)

(*) actually in a huge L2 cache but as far as the Atari is concerned it's addressing st-ram.
Speed of ST-RAM according to Memspeed: The actual reason for this was actually something completely different :lol:
I got fed up with burning ROMs and wanted to load and reboot into rom images from disk without touching the PMMU.
So I brought back an old ST-RAM cache experiment and updated it to support ROMs too.

Whether or not this will reach a release or not depends on if/when support software is done.
It's just a crude commandline tool at the moment and it would need to be something more user friendly.
Probably also integrate the existing maprom functionality into the same program -- would be nice to replace maprom with something written in C anyway.

The pro's:
- It can shadow ST-RAM in fastram
- It can shadow ROM in fastram
- Rom images can be loaded from disk into the rom-shadow.
Without using the PMMU, which is important for being able to cold boot into another soft-loaded rom.

The con's:
- 6MB is reserved by the firmware. A 64MB card will show 58MB available.
- ST-RAM shadow will not work if using DMA devices, and I don't really have any intentions of trying to remedy that.

dangit ;D

agranlund wrote: 26 May 2022 19:56 - ST-RAM shadow will not work if using DMA devices, and I don't really have any intentions of trying to remedy that.

Nicely done! That damed pesky DMA strikes again.

All loading done from IDE, I presume?

BW