exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 02 Jun 2025 23:11 @Badwolf

Might be best to send me your board to try here. I've got 4 boards tested on 3 motherboards and no issues now.

OK. I'll do one more check of my CPLD soldering and if I don't find anything I'll get it on its way.

BW

Badwolf wrote: 03 Jun 2025 14:13 It's modern software custom written by Anders with exactly ST536s in mind. It works in all configurations. If it's not working: something's wrong.

Did @agranlund or anyone test DOTT in anything but EMUTOS though ? I tend to be the only one using TOS. So I question if DOTT works in TOS, has ever worked, or has ever been tested in any other configurations ? I think those questions should be answered before chasing hardware faults which may or may not even be there.

Yes, all run under Current13 firmware.

I tried DOTT in EMUTOS and it locks up with the AB code enabled which is bizarre. TOS just resets when trying to load DOTT.

EDIT:

The IDE IRQ issue with EMUTOS was a "typo" in the IRQ IDE code :headbang:

exxos wrote: 03 Jun 2025 14:36 Did @agranlund or anyone test DOTT in anything but EMUTOS though ? I tend to be the only one using TOS. So I question if DOTT works in TOS, has ever worked, or has ever been tested in any other configurations ? I think those questions should be answered before chasing hardware faults which may or may not even be there.

These are reasonable questions as to avoid chasing ghosts.
I would have thought I'd heard something from someone if it didn't work in standard Atari TOS, and all the videos I've seen it running on different machines cannot all have been using EmuTOS?

EmuTOS is the default boot option on my ST so it would have been mostly tested with that for sure but I'd be surprised if I never booted to Atari TOS for compatibility testing but it was some years ago so I can't swear by anything :)
(STe, TT, and Falcon testing was done in Hatari since I do not own any of these machines - I'm assuming I used Atari TOS images there but again I can't say for sure)

I've side-stepped a bit to look into why 8MHz doesn't work. I went back to the original ST536 code and its not happy there either. It gets to desktop with EMUTOS, but not my patched 206. It basically does the ROM CRC then just before the STram test bar should come up, it resets.

Sometimes it will get almost to the end of ST RAM test and then reset..

Now I just thought I'm actually using @PhilC's motherbard.. I just swapped to mine, and its got to desktop.. Mine is the integrated blitter.. BUT.. mine also has 2.2K bus pullups...

I got my other test board which is the same as @PhilC (external blitter) and thats doing the same (resetting)

So I guess I will have to patch on the pullups on this board to see that is causing the problem more not next :roll:

It's all good progress @exxos. I thought there might be some issues between the integrated and external glitter variety boards.

My board was totally standard, except having a few extra chips socketed as you know.

PhilC wrote: 03 Jun 2025 19:48 It's all good progress @exxos. I thought there might be some issues between the integrated and external glitter variety boards.

My board was totally standard, except having a few extra chips socketed as you know.

Yeah I had no end of problems with my V1 STE booster between the 2 board types. IIRC the external blitter boards had a really bad 8MHz clock. Its why I put a buffer on it. But the boards I have here and with and without buffers and no odds eitherway..

Finding out what this problem is next which is probably going to drag on for a while :(

If I delay the clock by like 20ns , or tie the CPU clock to the master 8mhz directly, it works. So for some reason those external blitter boards seem very sulky about clock sync :shrug:

I checked every pin on the blitter (even removed it and made no odds).

I did see this on BR.



So I cheated and didn't let the CPU see the bus requests at all. Now its got to desktop just fine... Hmm....