VXL-30 RAM contention with GVP series II HD RAM

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Been messing around with this all night... the VXL-30 and its RAM daughtercard installed, I am only able to see 8mb of RAM at a time. Take your pick: 32-bit RAM or 16-bit... never a combination of the two. I've adjusted the jumper settings on the VXL daughtercard according to the manual and it contradicts itself. In my A2000, in order for 32-bit RAM to be recognized and utilized as such, I must set the RAM allocation jumper to 'high'. The manual states that I must run the setvxl command to add this memory in my startup-sequence, but that's simply untrue. The 32-bit RAM is recognized immediately when booting in 030 mode - regardless of it being configured as high or low.

Disable the jumper to configure the 32-bit RAM as low and it simply vanishes. Yet, my 8mb of GVP memory is now recognized.

Further... when booting in 68000 mode, 32-bit RAM is disabled and the GVP shows up as advertised as per the manual. All of this is done automatically and no messing about with the maddmem command adds anything - ever. When trying that command, always comes back to say: "no extra ram found to add", regardless of what mode I booted from or switched to.

Not a terribly big deal as 8mb FAST is plenty fine (even when running 3.9), but seems to me, I should be able to take advantage of the 16-bit RAM on the GVP Series II combo card in addition to the 32-bit RAM on the VXL.

Sysinfo does not recognize the GVP RAM at all, yet Showconfig does, but it shows it as being Zero k.

Again, not a super big deal as I'm extremely pleased with this setup: A2000 with Kickstart 1.3 on the mobo, 1GB HD, GVP Series II combo SCSI/RAM card and then the VXL has its 32-bit memory as well as a Kickstart 3.1 in ROM. I can literally switch between 030 Kickstart 3.1/OS3.9 and 68000 Kickstart 1.3/floppy mode at the flick of a switch. Each mode has its respective 8mb of FAST RAM and 1MB of CHIP.

I'm guessing there's either some kind of contention here or the VXL is simply not compatible with the GVP for whatever reason. I know the Supra Turbo accelerator doesn't like to boot in Turbo mode with GVP stuff, so perhaps that's the issue here. Thing is, I have a Supra RAM card and an A2091 card with 2mb of RAM installed and both yield the same exact results: 16-bit Zorro memory is never made available in conjunction with the VXL RAM  

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Yup, both the VXL and the GVP have to share the same memory space, no way to have 8MB on both.

Really seems to be the case, despite the fact you can map the RAM either high (0800 0000) or low (0020 0000). If this were to play correctly with the 16-bit RAM, what address *should* it have been set to start at and why wasn't the device configured as such in the first place? Is its high setting not high enough to get out of the auto-config space?

Nowhere in the manual does it talk about sharing RAM this way. Pretty much only mentions the re-mapping of its 32-bit RAM just in case there's a conflict with something else.

One thing I should have tried in order to test this further was to set the VXL to 2mb of RAM (assuming I could trick it that way) and saw if it would have allowed 6mb on the GVP card. But if you guys (SACC and Damion) are fairly certain it wouldn't work, I won't bother.

BTW: I'm happy with the performance of OS 3.9 on this 50mhz 030. Might be neat to sneak the VXL inside my A500 sometime and have 3.9 running on that, but am afraid its stock power supply would be too wimpy for it. That and I'd have to extend the cap next to the 68000 socket so it lays downward to get out of the way of the VXL  

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I had the same setup on my A500+, 50MHz/8MB upgraded VXL running 3.9 from an external SupraDrive, all running on the same stock A500 PSU.  Can't recall any cap clearance issues, though I probably would've just shoved it over as far as it'd go.

Hmm... good to hear the power supply is up to the task! Re: the cap issue, do you remember what version mobo you had? Mine is a 6.x (rock lobster) and I've read (and have seen pics) where a cap south of the cpu socket gets in the way.

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You should be able to use the GVP RAM and the VXL-30 RAM at the same time if you set the jumper to map the ram high. You'll need to add the command SETVXL ADDMEM USE to your startup sequence somewhere to add the memory to the free memory list.

See... that's what I thought and I've tried that. Just brings up an error message of "no extra ram found to add".

I just remembered something... this card didn't seem to work when I first got it. Would just hang the system in an endless warm-boot cycle. UNTIL I soldered a wire from one of the PAL's to this jumper on the RAM card as pictured. All of the pics of other peoples VXL's as well as misc. Microbotics documentation regarding DMA led me to believe that's what needed to be done to a certain revision boardset. Was kinda surprised mine didn't have that jumper installed. anyway,  when the computer worked, I figured that was the problem. Then I read later that the VXL has problems with GVP Series II hard cards, and that you may have to change the MaxTransfer value to this one they provide in order for it to read properly - which I have not had to do.

I wonder if I go into HDToolbox, make the MaxTransfer value change and remove my wire... if that would affect the RAM issue. Am inclined to think its just a hard drive mod though.

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When I ran my VXL030 I used romtagmem (should eb on aminet or someplace like that) to map in the high memory. Took a reboot to do that, but then it was able to remap kickstart up there too and have 32bit  "ROM". I don't remember if I ran Zorro2 or other memory or not with it, but I didn't map VXL030 memory low, and I did not use their own utility for it high.

Thanks for the software tip billt! I'll give that a try sometime soon here and see if that helps.

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Thanks for the software tip billt! I'll give that a try sometime soon here and see if that helps.

We have bonanza!

That was it billt, that did the trick! Now the setup is working as I thought it should. 16-bit 8mb Fast from the GVP combo card and 8mb of 32-bit RAM off the VXL. All 16megs are showing now, whee!  

[save2600]

Thanks Billt!

We have bonanza, that did the trick! Now the setup is working as I thought it should: 16-bit 8mb Fast from the GVP combo card and 8mb of 32-bit RAM off the VXL. All 16megs are showing now, whee!

@Mongo, I couldn't get the setvxl program to play nice. It doesn't like its 'use' switch. Either in CLI or a string in startup-sequence. Always returns a 'Wrong number of arguments' error. The only way I can get this to work is to type 'setvxl addmem', press enter and then type 'use' and then press enter again. And the results are flakey as hell. Sometimes the computer would reset. Sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would only allow 2mb to show, while other times it would show the full 8mb. Weird.

But the ROMTagMem program works a treat, so I guess I'll just be using that instead