exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I need some diagnostic advice form you Guys.

My CD32 in combination with the TF330 is crashing / rebooting after roundabout 10-15 min of usage when the IDE drive is accessed.
First sign are some Graphic artifacts and some seconds later the system reboots.

The Chips on CD32 / TF330 (CPLD / CPU) are warm but not to hot to touch.

After the reboot, sometime the Fastram is gone or worse its not booting at all after the CD32 intro.

When i run Demo loop without any IDE activity or RAM Test it will run for some hours.
When i remove TF330 from the the system it runs also Stable with Compilation CDs with games and Demos

The CD32 is recapped with Panasonic Hybrid caps and i tested it with a beefy ATX Powersupply or a Switching PSU with 4.2A @ 5V and 1A @ 12V
I clean the edge Connectors with a fiberglas pen and IPA
I tested with 2 different CF Adapters and different CF Cards and a Disk on Module, witch all work in my A600
I tried a plain Workbench 3.1 installation and ClassicWB Lite / Full, no luck.
My guess it an Hardware issue with the CD32 or the TF330.

Please help.

Best regards

Bugman

What CPU are you using ? did you build the board yourself or buy from one of us builders ?

It does look like the CPU is crashing thats why ask which one you are using

Hi Supaduper,

I bought the board (Rev 3b) from 8 Bit Dreams and it has the CPU is a Motorola MC68EC30RP40B.

The solderjob looks superb to me.

Please don't rule out heat as an issue, even if it feels only warm to touch. Trust me.

Start with getting a basic household fan (pedestal fan?) and get it blowing on the TF330 while its in use. If it is stable, then go to the next step.. heat sinks? Cooling fan?

In my scenario in Australia, ambient temp of 30 deg Celsius and the TF330 would crash, reboot, reset after 10 or 15 minutes of use. A lot of diagnosing, and I set up a bedroom pedestal fan to blow air over the TF330 and it became stable!!! I added heat sinks to the CPU, CPLD and ram chips. I also hot glued a fan to the lid of the CD32... and it is now 100% stable and a dream to use.

I put the effort in to type up my story because I was pulling out my hair. Maybe this will work for you and you can have more hair than I do :D :lol:

@

matt020 wrote: 14 Aug 2020 12:38 Please don't rule out heat as an issue, even if it feels only warm to touch. Trust me.

I´ll give it a try, but i´m still thinking it is something else cos i can load some thing that will run for hours without disk access.
When the disk is accessed -> crash.

To rule out a Wrong Max Transfer rate i´ll setup a brandnew CF Card in WinUAE and give that a try.

After some hours of Elite Frontier Intro Loop and some File copys between Partions the system seems to be more stable.

I Installed a new CF Card (NoName Blue White) with FFS and installed ClassicWB_ADVSP_v28
and i added a tiny Fan under the Grill in the top half of the CD 32.

Yes, this is most likely the CPU overheating issue. If the added fan doesn't help, you can try reflashing it with the non-burst firmware. This will slow the CPU down a bit and most likely stop the crashing.

Saw this thread just now :shock:
@Bugman, please Return Your card for repair if You still experiencing problems, will do it free of course,
regards,

8 Bit Dreams

My TF330 runs stable now, I put a small Heatsink on the CPU and I bought a Meanwell power supply since then there are no more problems worth mentioning.
Thanks for all your help