E-Matrix / Viper 530 and Kickstart 1.3

[cpfuture]

Hi,

Not sure how many Viper 530 owners are out there, but here goes anyway. I have a Viper 530 installed in my A500+ and have been enjoying this accelerator for a couple of years now. Everything works fine except for one thing that I can't seem to figure out.

There's an option on the board which allows you to disable the Kickstart ROM that's on the accelerator (a 3.1 KS on my board) by removing a jumper. The system will then fall back on the Kickstart ROM that's installed on the A500's motherboard, which is a 1.3 KS.

Whenever I remove the jumper the A500+ will not initialize properly. It just seems to keep on resetting indefinitely. Upon power up I see the the dark grey colour screen, followed by light grey and then it just resets and repeats this cycle until I switch it off. It never reaches the white colour screen that should follow the dark grey and light grey screen.

When I short the jumper and swap the on-board 3.1 KS with a spare 1.3 KS I observe the same symptoms, so it doesn't seem to matter whether the 1.3 ROM on the A500+ mobo is used or the one on the accelerator.

The 1.3 ROM on the A500+ is functional. How do I know? There's another jumper setting on the Viper 530 which disables the accelerator board completely. If I short that, the A500+ initializes properly and shows the familiar 1.3 logo of the hand holding a Workbench disk. Unfortunately this mode disables the board completely and I was really hoping to be able to use the accelerator's on-board Gayle chip. 1.3 does not have IDE support built-in, but I was hoping to burn a custom 1.3 ROM with the scsi.device added so that I can boot from IDE in 1.3 mode, but the way things are looking now it seems the board does not play nice with 1.3.

My setup:

A500+ rev 8A board
1 MB Chip RAM memory extension added through trapdoor
Viper 530 68030 @ 50MHz
128 MB PS/2 memory installed
CF-to-IDE adapter connected to Viper's 2.5 inch IDE port
1GB Compact Flash card connected

In an attempt to rule some stuff out I tried booting with the 1MB Chip RAM removed, with the CF-IDE harddisk removed and with the 128MB mem removed. All give the same symptoms described above, i.e. flashing dark grey, light grey, followed by a restart.

Anyone out there ever got 1.3 working with the Viper 530 active (ie not with the board completely disabled)? Thx!

[cpfuture]

Thx for the suggestions guys. Yeah the Viper 530 is from DCE (aka E-Matrix 530). There is no jumper block for RAM config.

I tried booting with a smaller amount of RAM (a different memory stick) and without any memory installed at all, but it still gave the same symptoms. IIRC the Amiga should be able to address 8MB of autoconfig'ed memory with a 68k, plus something like 2 MB of CHIP and 512kB of slow/FAST RAM. The 68030 should have no problems addressing more, but I am not sure of any software limitations in the 1.3 ROM itself.

I tried softkicking to 1.3 and it gave a similar problem. Grey screen followed by reset in a continuous loop. I used SKick and fiddled with all the options available like where to load the ROM image but everything resulted in the same grey screen followed by reboots.

I might try Blitzkick next but I have the sneaking feeling that's there something about the accelerator board that just does not want to play nice under 1.3. The only option to use 1.3 is to disable the board completely, but then I don't have access to the HDD and I'm left with a basic A500 with a 68000 and 2 MB of Chip RAM. Ah well, I'll survive. I just wanted the option to run 1.3 for its retroness anyway.