Blizzard PPC flash update - which flash excecutable to use?

[Piru]

I should have guessed that when it comes to grappy manufactorer like Phase 5 and DCE which never really cared about customer support and why so many things in Amiga equipment business had to be done so anti-professional way.

If the flash ROM is empty there is just no way the HW can initialize itself. It's rather stupid to blame Phase5 for the trouble you're having.

Imagine if you would not get full BIOS or firmware file for example for your PC motherboard but only update.

Have you ever tried to flash a PC motherboard with an empty BIOS?

Hint: It won't even POST.

[Piru]

and IIRC, the firmware content is cripted as well.

It's not.

If you're not sure why spread such nonsense?

EDIT

Parts of the firmware are compressed to allow more code being included (BPPC firmware is quite stuffed, it has 68060.library, ppc.library, GRex support etc included). This has nothing to do with "encryption" which would be totally pointless anyway.

[Piru]

encrypted like the Elbox drivers?

The BPPC/CSPPC firmware is not encrypted. You should know better than to listen to more lies about this.

Any encryption would be pointless as it would need to be decrypted at run time, making it trivial to extract the decrypted code. Needless to say no such encryption exists.



Elbox Spider USB drivers were encrypted, with special checks to see if the encryption had been removed. If the detection was triggered the code would overwrite the RDB. This was done so that Elbox could keep on selling USB2 cards at premium price.

[Piru]

in few words you are saying that you are allowed to crack their drivers while they can't trash your RDB?

Uh, no I am not. I was merely explaining why Elbox did what they did. It should also be quite obvious that Phase5 didn't need to do such tricks since they did't try to sell stock PCI cards with premium.

Trashing the RDB is evil thing to do, regardless if someone tries to crack the driver or not. AmigaOS doesn't have any memory protection and thus just some unlucky memory trashing could result in the RDB being wiped. There's no excuse for what Elbox did.

interesting ...

It sure is interesting that you chose to interpret my concise explanation in this way.

[Piru]

It's rather stupid to make flash files that are just updates, because there is actually more work to take care not to overwrite those parts that are not covered by the update.

The flash updates are not partial updates. They contain the full firmware contents. However, the updater application needs to read the contents of the original flash ROM to get the correct configuration information.

IIRC the flash updater tool might even have some switches to provide some of this configuration information, but I might remember incorrectly (I'm fairly sure that there were some options to specify the CPU speeds etc).

As for the Phase5/DCE build quality: I've had Blizzard 1230-IV, 2 x Blizzard PPCs, BVision PPC, 2 x Pegasos I, Pegasos II and an EFIKA. All have been of excellent build quality (it's a small sampling I know).

[Piru]

If flash memory content is not codeprotected it would give some hope if I would get another Blizzard PPC even faulty one with working flash memory, I could carefully desolder and place to that kind of adapter. It does not matter if flash memory content is encrypted, compressed or anything else if the chip itself is not programmed with code protect on. I assume code protect is off, because running flash update is possible.

Indeed it would work, except that AFAIK the flash contains the HW configuration (CPU speed etc). So it'd be best to have a dump from a matching BPPC if only possible.

[Piru]

+Blizzard PPC has no SIMMs installed

Try with a SIMM. IIRC BPPC doesn't work without.