3.1 Kickstart 40.70 vs 40.68?

[desantii]

I recently got an Amiga 3000 that has kickstart chips 40.70. Just wondering what the difference is with the 40.68 ones? I had never seen 40.70 before except on a 4000T
 
thanks
 
PD: It does say on the sticker "Pilot Production Version"
 
Reads as 40.70 inside workbench as well

[Franko]

I recently got an Amiga 3000 that has kickstart chips 40.70. Just wondering what the difference is with the 40.68 ones? I had never seen 40.70 before except on a 4000T
 
thanks
 
PD: It does say on the sticker "Pilot Production Version"
 
Reads as 40.70 inside workbench as well

The 40.68 ones were made for the A1200, and the 40.70 ones were for the A4000, I don't think you can use the 40.68 version in an A4000.

[desantii]

The 4000s I ahve seen alll use 40.68 except the 4000T (40.70). That is why I thought is was weird to see a 40.70 for teh 3000
 

The 40.68 ones were made for the A1200, and the 40.70 ones were for the A4000, I don't think you can use the 40.68 version in an A4000.

[Franko]

The 4000s I ahve seen alll use 40.68 except the 4000T (40.70). That is why I thought is was weird to see a 40.70 for teh 3000

Can't find any details anywhere about the difference between the 40.68 & 40.70 versions. I can only think they must have done a few bug fixes in the 40.70 ones to fix some problems on the A4000...

[HammerD]

The 4000s I ahve seen alll use 40.68 except the 4000T (40.70). That is why I thought is was weird to see a 40.70 for teh 3000

OS 3.1 ROMS for A1200/4000 are 40.68.

A4000T was 40.70 because it moved workbench.library onto disk.  It also has support for A4000T SCSI in the ROM.

So if you are using 40.70 in an A4000 you need to have workbench.library in libs: on disk.

[Matt_H]

See http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_31.html

40.70 was planned for the 3000, but the SCSI driver was causing problems so they dropped it back to 40.68.

You've got a rare set of chips there! Grab the ROM to a file and do a byte comparison against 40.68 or 4000T 40.70

[desantii]

I'll do a grab tonight but don't have the other files to compare against, I can send to anyone if you have the files for the compare
 
 

See http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_31.html
 
40.70 was planned for the 3000, but the SCSI driver was causing problems so they dropped it back to 40.68.
 
You've got a rare set of chips there! Grab the ROM to a file and do a byte comparison against 40.68 or 4000T 40.70

[Piru]

Grab the ROM to a file and do a byte comparison against 40.68 or 4000T 40.70

Such comparison is unlikely to give any meaningful result, other than "the files are the same" or "the files are different".

Unless of course if you mean binary diff of some kind?

[Matt_H]

Such comparison is unlikely to give any meaningful result, other than "the files are the same" or "the files are different".

Unless of course if you mean binary diff of some kind?

True, a comparison wouldn't accomplish much. I suppose it might be the first step in figuring out how to extract the modules from 40.70.

[nikodr]

Such comparison is unlikely to give any meaningful result, other than "the files are the same" or "the files are different".

Unless of course if you mean binary diff of some kind?

By finding the differences one could use a dissasembly tool and find out what the different code does.Right?

[Karlos]

By finding the differences one could use a dissasembly tool and find out what the different code does.Right?

Assuming they can properly tell the code apart from data, perhaps.

[kolla]

Grab ROMSplit from http://www.doobreynet.co.uk/beta/index.html and compare away. The difference should be, as mentioned, lack of workbench.library and differernt scsi.device to support A4000T SCSI controller.

[desantii]

This one does have the workbench library, its for an A3000 not the 4000T
 
 

Grab ROMSplit from http://www.doobreynet.co.uk/beta/index.html and compare away. The difference should be, as mentioned, lack of workbench.library and differernt scsi.device to support A4000T SCSI controller.

[Ratte]

40.70 exists for A1200/3000/4000D&T.
The difference is only the SCSI.DEVICE.
When they started to chip the 3.1 ROMs they got feedback about deadlooks from HDDs.
The lastminute change .. they shiped ROMs with a older scsi.device which seems to be more stable.
V40.68 ....

[olsen]

40.70 exists for A1200/3000/4000D&T.
The difference is only the SCSI.DEVICE.
When they started to chip the 3.1 ROMs they got feedback about deadlooks from HDDs.
The lastminute change .. they shiped ROMs with a older scsi.device which seems to be more stable.
V40.68 ....

Exactly. The same sort of problems also existed for the A600/A500/A2000 ROM version. The scsi.device V40 crashed during the interrupt handler initialization, which is why the A600HD had scsi.device V39 in ROM.

As far as I know the final ROM changes to V40, through 40.70, all came about because the unified SCSI driver required further testing, but as Commodore was approaching its final days, time and resources were getting scarce.

It may have been a risky to build this unified SCSI driver in the first place. Because of the range of hardware it supported (A590/A2091/CDTV SCSI, A3000 SCSI, A600/A4000/A1200/CD32 IDE, A4000T/A4091 SCSI), the internal dispatcher code had to work very differently, too. The SCSI variant required a handler Task and an interrupt handler, and the IDE variant needed just an interrupt handler, but a different one from the SCSI variant.

What broke the V40 scsi.device for the A600/A500/A2000 was that the driver initialization code passed an uninitialized register, which would have contained a Task pointer in the SCSI variant, to the respective setup code. Out of curiousity, I tracked down and fixed this bug, and the resulting driver worked fine.