DiagROM for ST

[czietz]

OK, so I've tested this on my 1040STE.

First of all, no screen output at all -- though I realize this could be simply due to lack of support for monochrome monitors. Serial output works, however.

Of the 4 MB RAM my STE has, 2048 kB are detected as "chipmem" and 2048 kB as "fastmem". Whatever that distinction is; I guess these are Amiga terms that don't apply here. This implies however, that the "test detected chipmem" menu item will only test the lower half of my RAM. I would have guessed that I need to use "test detected fastmem" then to test the upper 2 MB, but that test just crashes with a bus error and a crash dump.

Also most other tests (e.g. audio, ports, drives) either seem to do nothing or crash as well. I guess that's because they're written for the Amiga and not ported, yet. Also, I didn't find the way to exit the keyboard test. It says "Esc to exit" but pressing Esc doesn't exit it.

[exxos]

I don't think screen support is done yet. I was helping debug this some months ago, it was working at some point, but other things got in the way so it never got finished.

TF only has a 1MB machine, so likely hasn't thought about higher RAM amounts yet. I doubt any test will work other than the first 1MB RAM test at the moment. I don't know how much he has patched up for Atari stuff currently.

[czietz]

Fine, I know this is work in progress and not everything will work.

Therefore, I now wanted to try to diagnose severe RAM faults, given that this seems to be one of the strong points of DiagROM. Fortunately, I have a SIMM at hand that is so severely broken that TOS won't boot anymore -- the perfect test, I thought.

Indeed DiagROM boots and then starts filling the screen (of the serial terminal) with pages upon pages of hexadecimal debug info / crash dumps ("illegal instruction detected"). Until I press a key, at which point the main menu appears. After that, sadly, the diagnostic is completely frozen. I cannot navigate the menu, be it using the serial terminal or be it using the keyboard of the Atari under test. Thus, I cannot select the RAM test from the menu and cannot diagnose RAM fault further.

(Side note: The official Atari diagnostic cartridge will at least tell me which data line is stuck on that broken SIMM.)

[exxos]

(Side note: The official Atari diagnostic cartridge will at least tell me which data line is stuck on that broken SIMM.)

I think diagrom will do that, I think its how TF diagnosed his ST RAM fault.. Think he even shows that on the video I posted.

[czietz]

Yes, I've seen that the diagROM RAM test has a really nice screen for showing individual bit / data line errors. However, I'm afraid I can only report what I observe and that is that I don't even manage to start said RAM test with the faulty SIMM because the program is completely frozen.

[czietz]

OK, if I put the known defective SIMM into the upper memory bank of the STE and then run a manual memory test (recall from my previous post that memory above 2 MB is not properly handled), I will indeed get the nice display showing me which data bit is at fault as seen in the video. But with the broken RAM in the upper bank, even TOS will boot and I could just as well run YAARTTT. Would be way nicer of course if the DiagROM also handled faulty RAM in cases where TOS is not able to boot anymore.

[terriblefire]

DiagROM needs no ram at all to do a memory check.

It will spit out data on the serial port.

Not sure what you are asking

[czietz]

Did you read my posting above? I can't even get to the memory test menu item when the faulty SIMM is in lower RAM bank because DiagROM is frozen in the main menu after spitting out a lot of "illegal instruction detected" errors.

[terriblefire]

Ok. Raise a bug then or send me a pull request.

[terriblefire]

You won’t get to the menu with broken ram. You should get that on the early serial port. Did you check that?

Either way this forum is not how you report bugs. (Because I only check the forum when Exxos pings me an mail to look at something)