exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hiya

The earlier parts of this build are on Facebook but I've moved my progress and questions over to here at Dave's request. :)

Anyway, thanks BW! It's running. I'd embarrassingly forgotten a couple of important resistors :lol:


My next question while I wait for parts is, what do I use to program the flash rom?

Thanks!

sety wrote: 01 May 2022 08:22 Anyway, thanks BW! It's running. I'd embarrassingly forgotten a couple of important resistors :lol:

Congratulations! Have you got the TTRAM working too or are they the parts you’re waiting for?

My next question while I wait for parts is, what do I use to program the flash rom?

Ah, now, this is a bit embarrassing. I’ve not actually fitted any flash to this revision yet so am not even sure the logic is in place to handle it correctly yet, nor have I rewritten the flashing software for this revision! (Rev4 had the data wires scrambled to aid routeing, but I thought this inelegant so put them back for this revision. It means the dfbflash tool I wrote isn’t compatible yet!)

Let me see what I can find in my repository for the older revisions when I get home. You’ll be an alpha tester ;)

BW

Badwolf wrote: 01 May 2022 09:57
Congratulations! Have you got the TTRAM working too or are they the parts you’re waiting for?

Thanks! I'm pretty excited about it!
I'm waiting on memory and the bus transceivers. RS listed them in AU, so I thought I had that in the bag, but then they slapped me with a stock error so had to go back to Element14 for that. Next year I will get a package from RS and I'll be like "What are these?" :lol:

Ah, now, this is a bit embarrassing. I’ve not actually fitted any flash to this revision yet so am not even sure the logic is in place to handle it correctly yet, nor have I rewritten the flashing software for this revision!

Not at all! This is amazing work that you are doing! I only fitted the flash ram because I had some here left over from when my CT60e stopped working and I pretty much ordered everything on the menu before starting the repair.

It will be very exciting to be able to try any TOS version in the Falcon when the flash is implemented. :)

In the mean time I'll play with BadMood and MiNT for a bit. :)

Hi BW

Can I substitute this SDRAM? I'm having trouble finding the ISSI brand locally, but there is a Micron Brand automotive SDRAM available here. The only real difference I can see is that it's a little slower at 6ns. Would this be a problem?

Thanks :)

Badwolf wrote: 01 May 2022 09:57 Let me see what I can find in my repository for the older revisions when I get home. You’ll be an alpha tester ;)

Oh I didn't read this bit. I was in such a hurry. If you do find something I'd love to test it for you!

sety wrote: 02 May 2022 05:11 Hi BW

Can I substitute this SDRAM? I'm having trouble finding the ISSI brand locally, but there is a Micron Brand automotive SDRAM available here. The only real difference I can see is that it's a little slower at 6ns. Would this be a problem?

Thanks :)

I think as long as you get the correct size it should work fine. Don't worry about the speed (ns) either as I doubt the board runs the ram at 143mhz anyway. BW can feel free to correct me :)

Yep, I've used variously Micron and ISSI at 6 and 7ns across a variety of boards and providing they're 54 pin TSOP-II at 32Mx16bit or 16Mx16bit, they'll be fine.

My board runs the RAM at oscillator frequency so, like Steve says, the speed is effectively irrelevant. The fastest operation is burst cache fill, which is one cycle every 20ns.

BW

Hi BW.

Neither Steve or I can get BadMood to run. Monitor goes out of sync once the game starts.

This could be BadMood itself, they may have done some weird low level timing stuff to get it to run as well as it does.

Looking into it, there is a 10Mhz jitter on vsync when BadMood switches to run around blowing stuff up mode.


Persistency of 1 second is set to make it easier to see on camera.

Is this using the vanilla 030 binary?

BadMood runs for me, but only this one.

My Falcon's not set up at the moment, but I doubt there're much I can realistically do anyway with a program that designed to squeeze every last drop out of a stock machine and provides different binaries for different accelerators (but not mine, obviously!)

BW

Badwolf wrote: 04 May 2022 16:09 My Falcon's not set up at the moment, but I doubt there're much I can realistically do anyway with a program that designed to squeeze every last drop out of a stock machine and provides different binaries for different accelerators (but not mine, obviously!)

BW

Yours is a new born baby! Perhaps collectively we can put a tiny bit of pressure on DML to release the sources? ;)