exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Lets kick off the week with a new firmware for the TF536.
Its not a massive update but it does fix a bug with the NVRAM on the A570 and i suspect may fix the DTACK issue people had with the ZZ9000. But I havent confirmed that. That is to say it may be possible to use the stock ZZ9000 firmware. If someone could test that and let @mntmn know that would be great.

The motivation for the update was a request from the CDTV project guys that there was a bug with bookmarks on the A570 CD Drive. They very kindly send me a unit to test with and i was able to reproduce the problem right away. It seems that DTACK was bouncing and this cause me to bounce DSACK. Turns out if you do this when accessing word on a non-longword aligned port you can cause the 030 to read from the wrong side of the 32 bit bus. It didnt happen reliably but it did happen.
In this case we were reading 58AC. The solution was to add some hysteresis to the DSACK signals.

I have also incremented the product id to 5 so that people can identify if they have the latest in the ESM and added a firmware stamp in the colourbars rom .. This isnt present on the CDTV version. Also the CDTV version can be used if you just dont want the colour bars for whatever reason (some people like it as a bootup indication).
This is how i am planning to stamp firmwares in the future.

Unless i get actual bug reports i dont plan to do any more FW updates for the TF536 as i believe its pretty sorted at this point.

Enjoy and please let me know if there are any issues with this.

Excellent work, thank you 😊

Nice. Many thanks for this and to CaptainFuture who is behind the CDTV/A570 Extended ROM 2.35 development.

Not that it really matters (as it has been worked around in SW) but does this firmware also fix the CDTV address clash issue?

I *think* the TF536 at one point had an its own boot ROM mapped into the Amiga address space? I don't think it is used. But the address decode was not completely removed? CaptainFuture knows the real technical details.

CaptainFuture wrote:The first 64K at $F00000 contains some diagnostic aid code / flashes colours on screen at start-up which overlaps part of the Extended ROM space

Thank You very much Stephen! works like a charm here!

alexh wrote: 31 Oct 2022 10:52 Nice. Many thanks for this and to CaptainFuture who is behind the CDTV/A570 Extended ROM 2.35 development.

Not that it really matters (as it has been worked around in SW) but does this firmware also fix the CDTV address clash issue?

I *think* the TF536 at one point had an its own boot ROM mapped into the Amiga address space? I don't think it is used. But the address decode was not completely removed? CaptainFuture knows the real technical details.

Thats what the specific CDTV jed is for that i mentioned in my post. It doesnt have the colourbars. There should be a total of 6 jeds in this package.

Thanks

8 Bit Dreams wrote: 31 Oct 2022 10:54 Thank You very much Stephen! works like a charm here!
IMG_20221030_203455.jpg IMG_20221030_203147.jpg

Thanks for the feedback. Let me know if you can test the ZZ9000.

EDIT: Failing that if anyone has a disk image i can test the ZZ9000. I just dont have time to get a disk setup for ZZ9000-ness.

Don't own ZZ9000, sorry... :oops:

8 Bit Dreams wrote: 31 Oct 2022 11:45 Don't own ZZ9000, sorry... :oops:

No worries. If anyone has a bare bones disk image i can try on the 2000 let me know.