User avatar
Overmann

Posted Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:48 am

Soooo, inspired by AmigaLove, my quest for the A1000 is finally about to be completed. I bought my machine a while ago, and after some cleaning and tiny repairs It's now running beautifully. I ordered the RAM/IDE and kickstart boards about a year ago, and after A LOT of work (I had to replace some chips on the daughterboard due to the originals being to slow.. Took ages to figure out :P ) I have finally gotten Workbench 34.34 installed on my internal CF HDD. 8mb ram and all that. Great stuff!

HOWEVER, I've not really used 1.3 with a HDD before. Back in the day I only had an A500 dual floppy setup, and didn't even know that HDD was possible on the Amiga. I was a kid and more then happy to load all my software via floppies :)

Now I do find I need some help working this stuff out. I have the manuals and have been reading quite a lot during setup and installation, but a couple of things still confuse me, and more are sure to pop up while exploring this setup.

Firstly, I have copied SysInfo onto my second partition but it won't start saying it needs explode.library. I copied it from the sysinfo floppy and into my DH0:libs folder but that didn't help. Is there something I need to do in startup-sequence to make it look for spacific libraries? If I start the machine from the sysinfo floppy it has no problem starting the program and I can't see anything of note in it's startup-sequence.

Secondly, I have installed Settlers. It is supposed to run on an A1000, and it's supposed to use fastram, but when I start it it just blinks right back to Workbench. I assume my WB is drawing JUST enough chip ram to prohibit the game from loading, but that seems strange considering how slimmed down wb1.3 is. Do you guys/gals have any suggestions? Loading the game from floppy works great.

And thirdly, are there any must haves or tweaks in the installation or configuration of the system that I might have overlooked? Anything particular for 1.3, A1000 or the ram/ide board to make things work as seemlessly as possible?

I HAVE turned my pointer into intric8's awesome 3D-pointer by the way. Looks fantastic! :)

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jun 09, 2020 9:17 am

@Overmann

Congrats on getting your A1000 all setup!

Your symptoms sound like you're missing part of the Workbench install, which would be odd.

Are you saying that you installed Kickstart ROMs in your A1000? Did you burn custom KS ROMs with scsi.device on them? Curious how your set up is working, and the mods you performed.

User avatar
Overmann

Posted Tue Jun 09, 2020 9:27 am

I used the KS-rom switcher found on this forum and the IDE/RAM CDTV to get IDE and RAM. It has a scsi.device in ROM so booting works without issue.

IDE/RAM
Kickstart-adapter

I'm using standard 1.3 kickstart (original old one, actually).
I installed WB 1.3 by simply copying the files over from the floppy, and I set it up so that startup-sequence.HD is startup-sequence. It ends by executing startup-sequence.f (which is the old floppy "startup-sequence"). Kind of a weird way of doing it so there might be issues there.

The mods I did on the daughterboard are the ones described in the kickstart-adapter thread. It was pretty straight foreward, but I found that my PAL-chips were too slow to handle the IDE/RAM controller. Apparently some OLD A1000's were manufactured with slow chips for the PALs. No problem with normal use, but the 68k socketed IDE/RAM controller does not play well with those slower chips. In the end I had to desolder all of them and put in new, faster chips. Thankfully DrCook over at Amibay was kind enough to burn me a set of PAL chips and I'm finally rocking a working setup :)

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:17 pm

I remember the dev thread of that device on A1K.org. Sure you don’t have to apply a flywire for a specific signal from the expansion port for the a1000??

DJCook should know if it’s required.

How much ChipRAM do you have? The HDD may cost you some for buffers so you might run out of RAM.

You can always try to have SnoopDOS run in background with the 8MB of fAstRAM. That can help you find any crash issues.

Could you have missed any files during the copy process?

I recommend DOSControl 6 as file
Manager - lots of Good options :) .

It’s free from the website of the original developer.

If you have a CF attached to that IDE/RAM you could set this up in WinUAE.

Finally: if you use an 68010, you could try alten WHDLoad versions of the games, these might use FastRAM.

User avatar
Overmann

Posted Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:37 pm

McTrinsic wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:17 pm
I remember the dev thread of that device on A1K.org. Sure you don’t have to apply a flywire for a specific signal from the expansion port for the a1000??

DJCook should know if it’s required.
No there's no expansionport wire requirement. I'm sure of it. :)
McTrinsic wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:17 pm
How much ChipRAM do you have? The HDD may cost you some for buffers so you might run out of RAM.
I have 400kb free after WB is loaded. I actually managed to run the game just now, for some reason. But after a reboot it fails to boot again. I have no idea what changed. All other software I'm running works fine (DOpus, Megaball, DPaintIII etc)

McTrinsic wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:17 pm
You can always try to have SnoopDOS run in background with the 8MB of fAstRAM. That can help you find any crash issues.
Thats a good idea. I'll try to get SnoopDOS across.
McTrinsic wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:17 pm
Could you have missed any files during the copy process?

I recommend DOSControl 6 as file
Manager - lots of Good options :) .
I don't think I missed anything, but I'll doublecheck. Ill check out DOScontrol.
McTrinsic wrote:
Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:17 pm
If you have a CF attached to that IDE/RAM you could set this up in WinUAE.

Finally: if you use an 68010, you could try alten WHDLoad versions of the games, these might use FastRAM.
I'm using a CF and 68000. I actually enjoy using floppies and setting things up the slow way :P But I will consider moving it over to WinUAE if things get to hairy. :)

EDIT: SnoopDOS does not appear to work on 1.3, and neither does DosControl, but perhaps I can find some alternatives. ARTM is recommended for 1.3, but it went a bit over my head. I'll explore it more to see if I can learn something from the monitoring part of it. Fantastic tool though. Gives a LOT of great info on the system. And I'd never heard of ARP before. Pretty cool!

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Tue Jun 09, 2020 9:00 pm

Ouch, you’re right. Both programs are >KS 2 only.

Sorry for that!!

User avatar
Dynamic_Computing

Posted Wed Jun 10, 2020 9:08 am

Interesting setup on the A1000 for sure!
CHIP ram limitations really prevent WHDLOAD from working at all from my experience. It hardly works with 1 MB CHIP, but works great with 2 MB CHIP.

I am at about 430kb free CHIP on my AmigaOS 3.1.4 setup (Classic 520 accelerator, 8 MB FAST RAM) - so I am surprised you are at 400 KB with Kickstart 1.3 - are you using a lot of buffers on your hard drives? Maybe those are digging into your CHIP RAM?

User avatar
Overmann

Posted Wed Jun 10, 2020 9:24 am

Dynamic_Computing wrote:
Wed Jun 10, 2020 9:08 am
Interesting setup on the A1000 for sure!
CHIP ram limitations really prevent WHDLOAD from working at all from my experience. It hardly works with 1 MB CHIP, but works great with 2 MB CHIP.

I am at about 430kb free CHIP on my AmigaOS 3.1.4 setup (Classic 520 accelerator, 8 MB FAST RAM) - so I am surprised you are at 400 KB with Kickstart 1.3 - are you using a lot of buffers on your hard drives? Maybe those are digging into your CHIP RAM?
30 buffers, not much at all, but I do load AA LOT of stuff into mem during startup (by default). I have been wondering about that myself. I was kind of hoping that everything would be loaded into fastram, but fastram is barely touched.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Wed Jun 10, 2020 12:01 pm

You could post your startup-sequence, user-startup and the like here.

I don’t know if we‘ll find something but it’s worth a try.

User avatar
BatteMan
France

Posted Wed Jun 10, 2020 1:12 pm

SnoopDos 1.0 works on 1.3. You can find it in Fred Fish 388 :

http://aminet.net/package/misc/fish/fish-0388

For SysInfo, not sure the 4.x or 3.x versions work on 1.3 and I don't try this 1.0 version (not sure it's the same SysInfo...).

[EDIT] After reading the Amigaguide of SysInfo 4.3, it seems that SysInfo should work on 1.3. I'll give it a try ;) [/EDIT]





Return to “Software”