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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: ElZorro on May 10, 2006, 09:21:16 AM
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[color=ff0000]YO![/color]
Send in the experts!
A guy in Holland claims he has a A1200 with 10MB RAM.
DA!
How is this possible?
Did I miss anything?
How can I expand my Amiga 1200 HD with Blizzard 1230/4 with 64MB another way?
I like to use more chip-memory for Octamed.
Help?
Can anybody explain me what to do :idea:
thanks.
Frisby
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Well, i can be possible, but not with Chip memory, it can have 2mb of Chip + 8mb of Fast Ram, total memory 10mb, but A1200 was designed to have up to 8mb of chip, but commodore decrease for reduce production costs to 2mb, for this reason you can set chip memory to 8mb on WinUAE, i'm not sure but i think that i read somewhere.
And as you can see on my signature i have an A1200 with a Blizzard 1230 with 50 Mb of ram, 2mb of chip and 48 of fast ram, using SCSI board for your Blizzard you can plug two memory simms.
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Balrogsoft, thank you.
I try to expand for octamed to use longer samples.
Thrue other forum-dudez I found out this programme uses only chip-memory (2 mb)
So a couple of samples in the memory and it is full.
I thought the blizzard would expand the memory, but that was incorrect.
I need to decrease the volumes of the samples to work with is all (to bad :angry: )
any suggestions?
Frisby
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Octamed Soundstudio can load the sample on Fast memory, i found this:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/may97/octamedstudio.html
Another facility provided with OctaMED Soundstudio is less visible but still important. The Amiga is unusual in computer terms, in that much of the work that would normally be carried out by a main processor is actually performed by some custom-designed Commodore chips, such as handling the graphics display and retrieving sound samples from memory. The snag is that only parts of the Amiga's memory are accessible to these custom chips, and the amount of this so-called 'chip' memory is limited. OctaMED Soundstudio can, where appropriate, load samples into the machine's non-chip memory, and then transparently copy them into chip memory as required. You'd think this might slow things down a bit but, surprisingly, the buffering process turns out to be very fast.
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i just printed the article, now I only have to read it at a quiet moment, thank you so much.
Frisby
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@Balrogsoft: Actually, 2Mb Chip was always the maximum intended for the A1200, the idiots in charge at Commodore initially wanted 1Mb Chip to ship so they could then sell an expansion with the other 1Mb Chip RAM and an RTC, that's why we have the clockport, fortunately memory prices dropped sufficiently before release that they ditched that moronic idea.
AGA would have been extended later on to be able to handle 8Mb RAM, but it was never implemented what with the liquidation and all, no produced Amiga was ever going to have anything near 8Mb Chip RAM, Maybe the AAA stuff they were working on before the closure, but that never really got anywhere.
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I have got 66MB of ram in my A1200.
2MB of Chip :-D
64MB of Fast (Single 72 Pin Simm).
Kickstart is shadowed to Fastram (Accelerator utility)..
I like my Miggy1200. :)
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I win until now!!! 192MB! YEAH! :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
but really, who needs all this ram nowdays?
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@keropi
Easily topped. I know several users besides myself that have 256 MB fast ram installed.
What it's used for??? Nothing in particular, but it doesn't hurt to have a bit extra ;-)
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If we can connect a PPC/PCI/USB to our amiga, why hasn't someone made a hardware thing to expand our chipmem ?
Just a thought. :)
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if u need more chipmem, then grab an A4000... I think u can have 6MB chipram on a 4000...
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That is not what I am after.
I like my A1200, no I treasure it!
I guess I need another tool to expand the RAM.
I need to know which software or setting I gonne need to access as much as possible memory to use it for octamed v5.0.
GRTNX
Frisby
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keropi wrote:
if u need more chipmem, then grab an A4000... I think u can have 6MB chipram on a 4000...
That's not true at all. No Amiga can have more than 2 megabytes of chip ram.
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HellCoder wrote:
If we can connect a PPC/PCI/USB to our amiga, why hasn't someone made a hardware thing to expand our chipmem ?Just a thought. :)
The 2MB chipmem limit is a limitation of the Amiga's custom chips. If you wanted more chipmem, you would have to replace the custom chips with new versions which supported more RAM.
PPC cards, PCI busses and USB controllers are not subject to this limitation as they do not rely on the custom chips (except to load driver software or libraries, which are small enough to fit in 2MB chipmem or can be coded to use fastmem).
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moto
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If you wanted more chipmem, you would have to replace the custom chips with new versions which supported more RAM.
It should perhaps also be pointed out that there is no such custom chips available. 2MB is the chip memory limitation in hardware. WinUAE can have upto 8MB "chip" memory, though.
Oh my peg2 has 1GB of memory ;-)
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Piru wrote:
If you wanted more chipmem, you would have to replace the custom chips with new versions which supported more RAM.
It should perhaps also be pointed out that there is no such custom chips available.
Of course :-)
Piru wrote:
2MB is the chip memory limitation in hardware. WinUAE can have upto 8MB "chip" memory, though.
Yes but then you have to use Windows :-P :-P :-P :-P :-P
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moto
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with an expansion card!
it's only mode to have 10 mb on Amiga :)
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I try to expand for octamed to use longer samples.
I believe the newer versions of octamed also use fast memory instead of chip, so you should really upgrade your software :-)
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I have used both OctaMED v4 and Soundstudio. Soundstudio usually pops up a message if you want to load samples into fastram instead...Well, I could have sworn it did. :) Its been 4 years since I last used it, but I do remember that message.
v4 Automadically used your fastram first before it tipped over to the chip ram.
Either way, it should be able to do much more then that. :-D
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If you wanted more chipmem, you would have to replace the custom chips with new versions
That's not true, you could always use BANK SWITCHING :crazy:
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I'm quite happy with my bank! :-D
Actually, if you were to have hardware-controlled banks of 2Mb ChipRAM, you'd need some additional software to control all of this - to do things like copying the screen's contents between banks, etc, before switching... Sounds nasty!
- Ali
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As if the original thought of replacing the 680x0 by a PPC doesn't sound nasty. I remember my original thought when I read the news about a possible PPC card for the amiga... :)
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Tomas,
Upgrading Octamed?
How?
(I have only a demo version of OctaMed 6)
-I do not visit meetings anymore.
-In my area there is no one I know with an Amiga 1200, who also have Octamed in a higher version.
any suggestions?
Downloading from the internet and transfering to my miggy is still hard to do, because using a convert-prog is difficult for me. My (technical) english is not that good.
Frisby
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Hi Seiya,
Which expansion card is available?
Do you know any price, brand or type?
I can look for that!
frisby
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If I understand correctly, this is basically a paging file? So the custom chips fill up the 2MB physical RAM chips, then when they require more memory some pages of RAM are moved to a file, thus freeing up chip RAM. Is this right? Could the memory pages be swapped in to fast RAM instead to make it faster? Presumably the ROM would have to be patched to make use of the page swapping rather than just refusing to run the application when no physical chip RAM is available.
Is any of this actually possible?
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moto
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The contents of the chips aren't moved to a file, but the chips are instantly replaced with other chips standing by. Another memory map. This is what the old C64 did also. :)
So the custom chips would access the chip-mem as if they were never replaced, but in fact they are...
if this is possible is something else though
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Interesting. So there would be hardware in between the custom chips and the memory which can tell when the first bank of 2MB chips is full, then automatically switches to the second bank?
If the custom chips are addressing the same memory range no matter what bank was being used, how would the controller know which bank the required page is on?
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moto
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The controller/library would perhaps sit inbetween the allocmem function and store additional information required somewere that can tell the memory map being used in the allocated memory block. The controller would need to monitor the address lines and the chip accessing the memory ? And than quickly switch memory map if desired....
although I feel something is missing
Perhaps you could say,.. Paula has map one, and Denise map two giving them both 2 MB each ?
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HellCoder wrote:
Perhaps you could say,.. Paula has map one, and Denise map two giving them both 2 MB each ?
That would seem to be cleaner. Is it only Paula and Denise who address chipmem?
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moto
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No, I'm sure there are more chips accessing chip-mem. The Kickstart rom perhaps. Maybe this can be solved by having a small part of the 2MB setup as 'shared' memory and accessible in all memory maps. Interrupt lines and stuff should also be taken care of I think.
I think it would be alot easier if you have fast-mem too so you can have the stack pointer there. :)
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So who's gonna build this thing then? I want 128MB of chipmem :-)
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moto
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Would all that effort be any worth ?
Although I'm still sad such a thing was never made, now it's too late I think. :(
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Because it's there :-)
Also, there are still some games which need 2MB of chipmem, so have to be run with no startup-sequence.
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moto
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Such bank switching is not going to work in complex multitasking/multi-custom-chip environment anyway.
You'd end up switching bank for individual memory access cycles.
There are other problems aswell: Software gets pointer to allocated memory (say above 2MB). Software pokes the address of the memory to custom chip register. The problem here is that the higher order bits are just ignored, so the chip (and thus the hw sniffing the address lines) has no way of knowing which bank it should access.
Forget it.
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Uuh..
Both Denise and Paula have a hardware line indicating if they have a connection to the databus. (tri-state) Only one at a time can have access. If you would feed this line to a hardware working memory map switchbox you could seperate memory for Paula and Denise without any slowdown. The only problem would be if Paula and Denise communicate with each other through a memory.
Although I'm no expert.
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The custom chips can't hold or access any pointer >2MB, so how the heck this is supposed to work?
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Piru wrote:
There are other problems aswell: Software gets pointer to allocated memory (say above 2MB). Software pokes the address of the memory to custom chip register. The problem here is that the higher order bits are just ignored, so the chip (and thus the hw sniffing the address lines) has no way of knowing which bank it should access.
That's kind of what I was getting at when I said:
motorollin wrote:
If the custom chips are addressing the same memory range no matter what bank was being used, how would the controller know which bank the required page is on?
Piru wrote:
Forget it.
Forgotten :-)
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moto
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The custom chips won't have to access > 2MB, that's the whole point of the memory map. The only thing that would change is the memory itself, but still located at the same memory address.
The only thing that you would do is to switch between maps whenever Paula or Denise has access to the databus / address bus. The switch can be taken from the tri-state of Paula/Denise. This would indicate whether Paula or Denise has access to the datalines
I think it would be possible with some extensive work but not worth the effort.
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The custom chips won't have to access > 2MB, that's the whole point of the memory map. The only thing that would change is the memory itself, but still located at the same memory address.
The only thing that you would do is to switch between maps whenever Paula or Denise has access to the databus / address bus. The switch can be taken from the tri-state of Paula/Denise. This would indicate whether Paula or Denise has access to the datalines
So lets assume I allocate 32KB of chip memory. I get it from address 0x002fc238.
Next I poke in some sample data, and then I write the memory pointer to aud0ptl and aud0pth. Lower 16bits (ptl) is assigned 0xc238, and the upper 16bits (pth) 0x002f. I start DMA.
But instead of playing the sampledata I wrote, the hw actually plays whatever is in chip memory at location 0x000fc238.
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No, not exactly.
What you need to do is tweak the allocmem function too. You would have to indicate whether it is meant for Paula or Denise. Allocating memory for Paula would activate memory bank 2. Allocating memory for Graphics would activate bank 1. If you would then play a sample located within the 2MB range Paula will be activated when it wants to (DMA). The activation of Paula can be detected by looking at the hardware lines (tri-state, enable line). If this happens the memory bank would switch to the 2MB chips for Paula (sound) (bank 2)
So both sound and graphics are located from location $000000 to $001fffff (2MB?) but in different chips.
But then again, the effort isn't worth it.