AmigaOS 3.2 problems

[kolla]

Sounds like the A1200 has a ram expansion card with more than 4MB RAM?

[kolla]

Then it wouldn't work with 3.1, too.

Only with 3.0 and 3.1.4 the PCMCIA port is available errorneously with 8 MB RAM. In 3.1 and 3.2 it is handled correctly.

As far as I know, there isn’t any correct way to have 8MB of fast ram work together with pcmcia on stock a600 and a1200, as both 68000 and 68EC020 only had 24bit address space (16MB, but Amiga only use positive signed address space, so 8MB).

So I’m not sure what exactly has “worked” or how?

[kolla]

@PunkTiger

Are you by any chance using 3.0 (39.106) kickstart chips with OS 3.1?

Could you try 3.2 (or 3.2.2) kickstart with one of the 4MB simm modules removed, for “science”?

[kolla]

Well, since you already write that you are using 3.0 kickstart ROMs with 3.1, the “mystery” is solved - as Thomas mentioned above, it only works by luck because of a bug, and chances are high that if anything tries to fill up those 8MB of RAM, the system will crash. If you remove one simm, 3.2 kickstarts (and 3.1) will work. An option is to burn custom 3.2 kickstart ROMs with card.resource (iirc) from 3.1.4 kickstart, that miraculously managed to re-introduce the bug from 3.0.  You could also try to install 3.2 kickstarts and the load card.resource from 3.1.4 or 3.0 using LoadModule when you need pcmcia. But with all these “working” solutions, you run the risk of random crashes should something try to actually use all that ram (of which quite a few bytes of address space is pointing to the pcmcia rather than actual ram).

Modern RAM cards typically has reset options to switch between 4 or 8 MB of fast ram, so that we only boot to 4MB when we know we’ll be needing pcmcia. Like on one a600 I got, where I do the opposite, boot with 4MB fast RAM by default and only press ctrl-a-a a liitle extra long to get 8MB just occasionally when needed.

[kolla]

Do you by chance have some fastata in that a1200?