The TF534 worked out of the box on my Atari, when using the official firmware.
As in, it booted up DiagROM, EmuTos and Tos2.06 just fine and I could test the ram, and see that integer performance was higher in Gembench (but don't expect any actual real-use performance improvements at this point).
I assume the TF530 will do the same?
If that is the case, then that's the way I would have started just to verify that the board was built ok. Good to keep the number of unknowns to a minimum :)
Then, to actually go fast, you need to be able to run apps from fast ram. And for the best experience, run TOS itself from fast ram. To be honest, most of the effort is software on the Atari side but I did have to make a couple of very minor modifications to the TF firmware:
- IDE addressing for Atari
- Expose IDE interrupt to INT2 pin on TF534 board, to be connected up to ACSI pin 10 as usual with Atari IDE addons (this is not needed for EmuTOS, only Atari TOS wait for this interrupt when accessing IDE)
- FastRAM location for Atari (at 0x01000000, same as on Atari TT)
- FastRAM size set to 4MB. I guess this would have to be 2MB for the TF530. (It has to be set up in the firmware due to the way Atari detects fast-ram - it relies on getting a bus-error to know where the RAM ends)
If you want them, you can get my branch of the firmware sources from here:
https://github.com/agranlund/tf534/tree/atari-target
(I now realise I should update the tf530r3 makefile to pass along the TARGET define so it can be built for Atari)
Additionally, you can find some software that I made in the thread that was linked above. They are for enabling fastram, and running TOS in fastram depending on if you use EmuTOS or TOS2.06.
These work fine for me but I consider them a bit of a proof-of-concept still.
The EmuTOS-in-fastram build assumes 4MB fastram but you could quite easily build it for 2MB as well - it's just compiler defines, no source modifications are needed.
** I don't have a TF530 card so I can't guarantee that any of the things I did for my TF534 will work on it. Although it probably will, or at least could be made to?
Off and on, when time allows, I am working on two separate programs which *should* be all I need to cover my fast-ram related needs:
1) A program that only sets up the fastram for TOS, the fastram DMA buffer + cookie & the PMMU table as on the TT and Falcon.
EmuTOS already does all this when it detects TT-RAM, so this program will be useful for when running Atari TOS.
Atari TOS doesn't do any of this when running on an ST/F/M (and some of the stuff seem exclusive to TOS >= 3).
2) A program that can load any TOS into fastram and execute from there.
Using the PMMU to map the ROM area to where TOS was copied to in fastram.
(Unlike my earlier proof-of-concepts which required patching the TOS2.06 ram-copy, or making a custom build of EmuTOS)
I'm thinking it would load the TOS that is already running from ROM into fastram which should not need to trigger a restart, or optionally and from an image file on disk which would then need to trigger a restart into the new TOS.
Oh, and if you have a blitter installed, I recommend removing it, especially if you intend to use Atari TOS (I believe this is recommended also for the PAK68/3)
At least for now.
There never was an official Atari with both blitter and fastram. EmuTOS recognise the fact that some unofficial setups can have both (eg; Falcon with CT60) and "disables" the blitter in that case. Atari TOS do not.
EmuTOS is a bit more stable in this regard but both of them will crash, or at least produce unintended behaviour, if an application ignores TOS blitter settings and directly access the hardware to blit to/from fast-ram.