exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Hi, I've recently built an A2000 with a TF536.

Motherboard in the A2000 was severely corroded so a built up a new one from a floppie209 remake PCB.
It has an ECS Angus and Denise fitted and has 1mb chip ram, plus 8mb of fast ram courtesy of a zorro II card and a TF536 installed in the copro slot..
I'm using RGB2HDMI for graphics output.
KS rom is 3.1 rev 40.63, WB is 3.1 rev 40.42

I've tested everything in AmigaTestKit and had no issues. I installed Monkey island on the CF card and have been playing that just fine.

Then I progressed to trying to get WHDload working - I installed it per instructions at https://guide.abime.net/home3.htm
I only followed chapters 1-4 and 10-11.
WHDload version is 18.8.6478

Then I tried installing Golden Axe and Lemmings, which work fine - when running the CF card in WinUAE.
If I move the CF card into the actual Amiga and try to run either of the games I get the following Guru meditation fault:


I tried decoding the fault code per the instructions here: https://www.amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?t=500
But the first byte is FF, which doesn't make sense to me.

I tried running WHDload from shell and it launched OK:


As everything works fine in WinUAE I'm wondering if there is some kind of compatibility issues with the TF536, I don't have a 68000 handy, but I'll try and borrow one so I can verify if the fault is related to the TF536 or not.

Other than that I'm not really sure where to start, last time I used an Amiga I was just a kid, so hopefully there is something obvious I'm missing. Finding it a bit hard to find useful info as it seems the vast majority of guides I come across are foe WinUAe and not real Amiga hardware.

One specific question I have, would this be considered WHDload crashing? Or is it the system itself crashing? I've tried to find WHDload troubleshooting guides but they seem to focus on errors in WHDload rather than a full on crash.

Any help/hints/clues would be greatly appreciated.

Takahashi wrote: 26 Sep 2022 01:258mb of fast ram courtesy of a zorro II card

I'd definitely remove this card and try again. While there shouldn't be any conflict between TF536 Fast RAM and Zorro II Fast RAM (They are mapped to completely different regions with different priorities) you don't need it and it only serves to complicate the diagnosis.

Takahashi wrote: 26 Sep 2022 01:25 Then I tried installing Golden Axe and Lemmings, which work fine - when running the CF card in WinUAE.
If I move the CF card into the actual Amiga and try to run either of the games I get the following Guru meditation fault:
As everything works fine in WinUAE I'm wondering if there is some kind of compatibility issues with the TF536

Did you partition your CF card in WinUAE? You might have configured it with the wrong MaxTransfer setting when partitioning in HDToolBox. The wrong setting doesn't affect WinUAE' (unless you specifically emulate a Gayle IDE?) but doesn't work 100% correctly on a real Gayle IDE interface like the one in the TF536. It works enough for AmigaOS to boot but as soon as you start accessing large files it breaks. The signs it is not working are... Guru Errors in WHDload (where it is trying to pre-load the disk image files which are usually more than 128Kbytes).

Solution : Repartition your CF card and change MaxTransfer to 0x1FE00. Reinstall WB & WHDload etc.

What file system are you using ? as if you have PFS3 which is the best IMHO then this is will eat up some chip ram on bootup depending on your system setup, and you really need 2mb of chip ram for a better experience with again in my opinion

This sounds suspiciously like the Max Transfer issue.

alexh wrote: 26 Sep 2022 07:28 I'd definitely remove this card and try again. While there shouldn't be any conflict between TF536 Fast RAM and Zorro II Fast RAM (They are mapped to completely different regions with different priorities) you don't need it and it only serves to complicate the diagnosis.

alexh wrote: 26 Sep 2022 07:28Solution : Repartition your CF card and change MaxTransfer to 0x1FE00. Reinstall WB & WHDload etc.

Wow thanks @alexh, removing the 8mb fast ram card got Lemmings working and changed the Golden Axe fault from a guru crash to a WHDload error popup, and the change of max transfer + reinstall got Golden Axe working!

I'm really surprised the ram made a difference. I figured since it was all detected and passed the AmigaTestKit test that it was not going to conflict.

I note that with the fast ram installed you don't see the trainer pop up before the game launches. I wonder if that suggests that the trainer is using the 8mb ram but the game was running in the 64mb? I had set WinUAE up to have the same ram config as my actual hardware 1mb chip+8mb zorro2 +64 zorro3 and it didn't have an issue.

Thanks for your help guys!!!

Just a couple of quick questions:
1. Is there anything I can try to get the 8mb ram working - I know its not needed, but what else am I going to do with it :)
2. I've ordered AmigaOS 3.2 and I see that it comes with a patch for FFS that makes it faster more reliable and allows >4gb - Would it still be worth using PFS3 over the latest FFS?
3. I assume it's normal that the IDE drive connected to the TF536 shows up as a SCSI device?

Takahashi wrote: 26 Sep 2022 11:32 Just a couple of quick questions:
1. Is there anything I can try to get the 8mb ram working - I know its not needed, but what else am I going to do with it :)

Its actually going to slow your machine down. Throw it away.

Takahashi wrote: 26 Sep 2022 11:32 2. I've ordered AmigaOS 3.2 and I see that it comes with a patch for FFS that makes it faster more reliable and allows >4gb - Would it still be worth using PFS3 over the latest FFS?

A thump on the head is better than FFS.

Takahashi wrote: 26 Sep 2022 11:32 3. I assume it's normal that the IDE drive connected to the TF536 shows up as a SCSI device?

Yes. Thats what drives show up as on the A600/A1200