Amiga 1200 and accelerator cards and their RAM

[walterg74]

Hi all,

Recently got anothe Amiga 1200 that came with CF/whdload/etc, and an M1230 XA accelerator card with 16MB of RAM.

I tested it and all seems good.

Also from the same seller I got a Blizzard 1230 card with 32MB of RAM on it.

Now when I took out the forst card and tried the Blizzard, one thing that scared me is when I popped the Blizzard in, I got some weird lines on the screen (akin those that flash sometimes on loading screens), and then the infamous software error...

I booted with both buttons, screen came up fine, booted into a floppy with sysinfo and all looked good too. Then I remembered the seller also gave me a CF with the blizzard. Is this behaviour because I need to install some kind of driver for it to work with whdload/workbench? (And even bootup at all).

Booting a sysinfo floppy (or a workbench floppy) runs just fine.

Also regarding the RAM, when I check sysinfo, it seems with the Blizzard card it states the memory priority is 10. But with the other card, it seems the priority is 40?

Which is the better of the two cards to keep?

Thanks!

[walterg74]

Whichever one works.  :lol:

Kidding, but you don't provide enough info.  Both of those cards came in many varieties.   The M1230 XA in 33MHz, 40MHz, and 50MHz variants:

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/mbx1230

And the Blizzard 1230 is a whole family of cards:

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/blizzard1230mk1
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/blizzard1230mk2
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/blizzard1230mk3
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/blizzard1230mk4

Knowing the exact model and speed of the cards would help give a recommendation, here.  :banana:

Lol, you're right. I will double check again, but from memory, the 1230 is 40Mhz and the Blizzard is the II model.

Thanks!

[walterg74]

From memory booting with both buttons will have disabled the card.

The ram jumper may be set incorrectly

http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/Blizzard1230_jumpers.pdf

To start with you may want to set the jumpers to 0mb ram and kickstart in rom. I'm not sure if fpu clock will make a difference in booting, but setting it to synchronous might be worth doing.

If it still doesn't work then try removing the oscillator/fpu/ram, if that still doesn't work then there may be a problem with the card or your a1200.

Thabks, I will take a look. Keep in mind though that booting up with both buttons was just one thing I did, but I also tried bottong from floppy, once with a disn withbsysinfo and once with a workbench disk and in both cases that worked fine and I see the 32MB.

It's only when I boot with no floppy and let the "cf/hdd" ry to boot that the error shows up

[walterg74]

you should have a look in your startup-sequence.... maybe there is a special peace of software for the Microbotics card installed which causes the blizzard to crash ?

something like this:
will be helpfull if you can post it here

Thanks, I will take a look at that and post pback when I get home in the afternoon

[walterg74]

you should have a look in your startup-sequence.... maybe there is a special peace of software for the Microbotics card installed which causes the blizzard to crash ?

something like this:
will be helpfull if you can post it here

Hey guys, reviving this because unfortunately life stuff had prevented me from continuing my tinkering

Anyway as a recap:

Original card was the Microbotics M1230 XA, w/16MB simm

The card I want to keep and having issues with is a Blizzard 1230 II w/32MB (it has 2 simms).

If I let it boot up from hdd, as is, after I see the blizzard lines flashing and hdd starts to load, it reboots and I get one of those software failure errors (attaching screenshot).

If I interrupt boot (with both mouse buttons) and select to boot with no startup sequence, it loads just fine, and the cli says (running avail) that it sees the 2MB onboard memory and also the 32MB of fast RAM the card has.

So it would seem at least at first glance that something that gets loaded and that was maybe for the other card is causing this to crash. But I%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!8217;m not knowledgeable enough to determine what that is.
What exactly should I look for in the startup sequence? Could it be elsewhere too?

[walterg74]

Great... just type the whole explanation and stupid sytem asked me to re-login and lost everything...

Will go again...

[walterg74]

I just a had a look at the manual for the XA http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/M1230XA.pdf

Page 2 covers the included software for the XA.  Look for SetXA in the startup-sequence and also AddXAMem in the WBStartup drawer.

When you boot without no startup sequence try typing "ED SYS:s/startup-sequence" in the shell window.  This should bring the file up in a basic text editor.  If you don't see the SetXA command in there it's worth checking user-startup since it may have been placed there instead.
You can also use the shell to check for and delete the AddXAMem from the WBStartup or use the LoadWB command and do it from within Workbench.

I'm not sure if it works with the 1230 II but later Blizzard cards could be disabled at boot time by holding down "2" in the same way you use the mouse button to bring up the early startup menu.

Thanks Rob, I actually looked for those both in the startup-sequence and user-startup as well as WBSTARTUP and did not find them.

I think I made progress though...

Since booting with startup-sequence disabled works, I tried commenting out most of the startup-sequence file except for assignments, etc and things that “looked harmless”, and that worked with a minimal set of stuff of course.

I then tried to start un-commenting the file, just a short bit at a time. As luck would have it, it seems something in the first part of the file is the culprit, as it went back to not booting.

Reversing course, I commented that part again and un-commented EVERYTHING else, and it booted uo fine, to a colorful WB, etc.

So now I will focus in finding the culprit in this smaller section. This is what it contains:

IF EXISTS DEVS:scsi.device
   C:LoadModule DEVS:scsi.device
ENDIF

C:Bblank

C:GetMouseInput LOCAL

IF $MouseInput EQ 1
   Unset MouseInput
   C:SetPatch QUIET
   C:Assign > NIL: ENV: RAM:
   C:Assign > NIL: T: RAM:
   C:Execute S:Maxmem-Sequence
   EndCLI >NIK:
EndIF

IF $MouseInput EQ 2
   Unset MouseInput
   C:Execute S:Bootmenu-Sequence
   EndCLI >NIL:
EndIF

Unset MouseInput

[walterg74]

startup-sequence is a bunch of commands wich configures machine to load workbenceh.

You can comment out anythin with ; before a command.

If you machine doesn't boot to OS it can't be anything else. After LoadWB command is loaded it start to execute programs from wbstartup drawer. So wbstartup drawer is another option, but it is unlikely.

You can boot with both mouse button presed, choose boot without startup-sequence.

Then set echo on, set echo ON after that you can execute startup sequence manually. Go s/ drawer on shell and write execute startup-sequence.

When echo is turned on you should see wich command causes error

Kinda weird, ran it with the echo but while something displayed I didn’t get to read it because screen went black and rebooted...

In any case, seems I found the culprit, as I know have everything as it was originally (un-commented) except this:

IF EXISTS DEVS:scsi.device
C:LoadModule DEVS:scsi.device
ENDIF

So I guess it’s this scsi module that’s conflicting with my card?? (i had read that this blizzard also comes with a scsi connector??)

[walterg74]

Yes it was an optional extra.

So what exactly does this mean? The other card does have it and so when you load the module it just gets loaded and works as expected and this one doesn’t and this load causes it to crash? (Maybe tries to actually access the card module which does not exist?)

[walterg74]

In a nutshell, you are correct.
The scsi driver tries to access the scsi module, but it's not present and the scsi driver cannot handle the situation so crashes.

Had the same problem myself a good while ago...

Awesome. Well, mystery solved I guess.

Now I am curious about the second CF the seller gave me telling me to use it with the blizzard... probably just different stuff in the startup-sequence I guess, and not really needed, but bonus for me I suppose