This is not a Falcon 030

[exxos]

Willy posted a little about this on 8 Jan this year on the F030NG discord channel. The SV went on hold due to the silicon crisis a few years ago. The Ct60e license should still be valid he said.
Seems like he also had about 40x CT60e that failed tests that needed rectifying but they went on a shelf. We all struggle with mental health from time to time and Willy mentioned this too, with (too) many projects on the go, its a struggle to complete. Hopefully he's in a better place and Willy if you're reading, if any of us can help, please reach out. 🙏

Thanks for posting that :thumbup:

I often wonder what happened to the CT60e as it was a great project. I own one myself :)

[Badwolf]

Not wishing to hijack, but since the initial question appears resolved I hope it's not too bad:

What's the potted difference between the CT60, CT63, CT60e and any other variants, just out of interest?

BW

[sety]

What's the potted difference between the CT60, CT63, CT60e and any other variants, just out of interest?

CT63 and CT60/e have programmable freq generators where as the ct60 uses an osc. ct63 doesn't have support for buss speeder. ct60/e does have the speeder circuit but it isn't populated. ct60/e uses the atari power header instead of the floppy drive power cable and I think (but not sure) that the ct60 has a different rom chip. There might be other differences, but those are the main ones

[Steve]

I think the ct60e was also built with thicker PCB layers/traces? Mine needed repairing once (cold solder joints) and my iron wasn't strong enough to melt the solder on any of the IC's lol

[mikro]

@mikro didn't know that, I remember there were some talks about fixing it (on fpga level?) by Nature, but don't remember how it ended with nothing at all..

Well, with the new SuperVidel in the works it's no surprise that fixing their old product isn't exactly #1 priority.

[Badwolf]

There might be other differences, but those are the main ones

:thanksyellow:

BW

[sety]

I think the ct60e was also built with thicker PCB layers/traces? Mine needed repairing once (cold solder joints) and my iron wasn't strong enough to melt the solder on any of the IC's lol

I feel that pain... The thermal reliefs are almost non existent.

[foft]

Sorry for the silence here. Really appreciate the replies and suggestions.

NVRAM was my first suspect. I'd run the diagnostic card a few times, which I think resets it right away(?). Anyway improved my setup on that since I'd got a bit of a flaky 'sawn in half' arrangement. Also improved some of my CT60 bus boost wiring. I tried starting with a fresh compact flash card from an old backup. I also increased the 3.3v->5v delay a bit (wasn't always enough).

Anyway finally worked something out...

I'd removed my CTPCI to strip back the system after seeing some random instability. This seems to be what triggered it. CT60 TOS 2.0.1 seems to behave differently with and without the CTPCI connected. Without CTPCI: Runs memory test. With CTPCI: Displays devices on PCI bus. When I skip the memory test it boots fine. When I let it run (the main memory one) then it enumerates IDE/SCSI devices slower then comes up with this error! So popped the CTPCI back and the problem went away.

The good news is that the system seems stable (for now, its still a Falcon!) after my tidy ups above to try to track this down.