exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi guys,

First of all I just wanna thank you guys and Stephen in particular. It's been wonderful working with this stuff. My intention was to start a thread documenting my build, but I've ran into a small issue that I think is worth asking about. I realise the 530 is now somewhat depreciated, but since I already had the unused parts from last year I thought i'd build it up anyway. After sorting out the usual poor solder joint issues etc I got the board up and running without any issues.

The problem is IDE. I am using an IDE-SDCARD board, which may well be the issue. For small(ish) files I can move things over from one drive to another just fine, but for anything bigger than about 50-100k, the system often freezes. This is either in the shell or in dopus. I figured this was an OS/maxtransfer issue, but i've tried different filesystems and different sized cards. If I use UAE to populate the SD card, then I can run large-file programs (such as games) fine using the 530. It is only the writes that are the problem.

Crucially, at random times the copy will complete. Then on the next attempt the progress bar will freeze.

I'm running an EC40C at 50MHz without an FPU. I'm on the second to last firmware, but have also run the latest firmware with no real difference.
Right so everything with this card is for the most part fantastic. I've run both systest and MBRTest-2 overnight without a hitch, and had the frontier intro looping for hours again without a hitch.

Now I can live with this, obviously - I can just do my larger file transfers in UAE and move the SD card over, but ideally i'd like to iron out the bug.

My question is this - how to proceed next? Could running the EC40C (which to be honest is, i think, a re-screened EC33C) at 50Mhz be causing the intermittent problem? What about running without the FPU? Would I have such an otherwise rock solid system if that were the case? Finally I imagine this may well be a badly behaving IDE2SD. Could someone recommend either a CF2IDE or SD2IDE that they have found to work with the 530?

To test I have access to a 200MHz scope and a basic microscope, though to be fair if it was a solder bridge or something I don't think it would be working at all.

Sorry for the long post, and again thanks so much for giving to the community in this way!

Cheers,

John

My IDE2SD works fine. What have you set the max transfer setting to ?

I tried 0x1fe00 and 0xfe00 as well as small partition sizes with the default maxtransfer settings.

I did initially think it was something i'd screwed up on installation, but sometimes the copies do work, and i've tried on a fresh 4gb SD using just the 3.1 install disk to partition and format a small partition.

I still could have screwed something up though. I'm guessing this is exactly what a maxtransfer problem would look like?

Cheers again

Yeah it screws up on bigger files.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=45491

Thanks, was just reading through that - I think I need to just go away and start again from scratch using PFS3_AIO and making sure my maxtransfer is low enough. Certainly seems symptomatic of that particular issue.

After I get the problem, by the way, a soft reset of the machines renders the SD card invisible to the Amiga. I have to soft reset another two or three times before it'll boot from the card - I'm assuming this is just typical of an HD install in a 500?

Oh by the way are you taking pre-payments for the 534 cards, or would you rather wait until your own shipment is in?

Cheers again

I’ve give the usual crowd the TF534 gerbersZz I’m not ordering more for a while as my time is mega limited right now

Ah okay, looks like I just missed out, never mind.

At least the 530 is working for now anyways!

John