Workabout for PCMCIA unfriendly accelerators

[dougal]

PCMCIA unfriendly accelerator (like M-Tec 1230 Viper) = no PCMCIA unless jumpered down to 4MB.

Use Skick to kick down the Amiga to Kickstart 3.0

PCMCIA works without having to set the jumper to 4MB

[dougal]

The only downside is you lose 512KB fastram because kickstart uses it.

[dougal]

If the RAM is mapped into the Zorro II address space, it will not work with PCMCIA and 8MB. It doesn't matter what OS version you are running. It is a hardware problem, not a software one.

I tried it..  It works...

At boot 3.1(40.068) I see 6,800,232 Fast mem and WhichAmiga says i have 8192K fastmem . PCMCIA does not work.

I Skick to 3.0 (39.106) and see 6,110,736 fastmem and WhichAmiga says i have 8192K fastmem. PCMCIA works.

Only note.. When Skick to 3.0 and it reboots it wont boot up and you have to give it the 3 finger salute (reset CTRL Amiga Amiga). When it boots up to 3.0 you may not see the PCMCIA CF right away. Click the System Disk icon and the PCMCIA CF card shows. Strange.

But other then that it works.

[dougal]

Is the trick related to using skick or to having 3.0? I remember that my old MTEC was PCMCIA unfriendly with the 3.0 1200 i had in the late 90's.

Hmm no idea. I guess i could try and Skick into 3.1 and see what happens. Will post.

[dougal]

Nope. Tried 3.1 skick and pcmcia did not work. With 3.0 its fine

[dougal]

is a kickstart 3.1 bug
the idiots of commodore touched some things in carddisk.device
I have an A1200 + TRA1200 turboboard and idem problem
Kickstart 3.0 works wonderful with pcmcia + 8mb the problem is that you can't run OS3.9

I'm working in find a way to make OS3.9 works with roms 3.0 or to build a special kickstart 3.1 with the oldest carddisk.device from kick 3.0

any ideas?

Good luck with that. Do let us know when you when its done.. you know that would be a great idea to have a special modified kickstart 3.1 burned into roms so that there would be no need for skick (and the fact that it takes 512k out of the fast ram).