Classic Workbench; Problems with aca1233 accelerator.

[wrath of khan]

But the card shows up in early startup?  Assuming nothing got knocked loose, hold down both mouse buttons.  Boot with no startup-sequence.  Type:

ed s:Startup-Sequence

Does the startup-sequence load?  Post a screenshot.  Don't make any changes at this point.  

It seems that now I can only access the cfcard by first booting from my wb 3.1 floppy. The cfcard classic wb desktop appears but now the floppy 3.1 is a bootable icon here. I need to change it to prioritise the cfcard/hardrive to boot first?
I'll try what you said.

Ok. first it said please insert env; i cancelled this prompt. then it loaded the startup sequence, pic attached.

[wrath of khan]

Quoting from the ACATune-readme:

ACAtune -maprom * p

With Kickstart in fastmem, the computer starts extremely fast. Sometimes so fast that the Gayle chip is not yet out of reset state - it will miss some accesses. As a result, the computer does not find a harddisk and comes up with the "insert disk" screen, waiting for a bootable disk to be inserted. By adding the "p" option to your maprom command line, ACAtune will attempt to patch the kickstart and insert a short waiting period on every reset. This will give the Gayle chip and harddrives enough time to wake up from reset condition and go into normal operation. The screen is turned light brown during the waiting period.

It could be this. On your ACATune line in your Startup-Sequence, after the '*' write a 'p' as shown above. So '....maprom * p >ram:acaoutput.txt'

I added the "p" the screen turned browne a few times and when it stopped loading, i was left with a blank screen.
The system is shagged now it seems. The cfcard desktop appears but nothing works, no programs whatsoever will launch. Only the wb 3.1 floppy icon works.
There was some boot options in a settings/startup. They were:
Sequence, user, assign, cliboot,wbsmanager, minboot, safe, runlist, shell and whdload. I may have changed these yesterday by accident; I know I clicked on minboot and on safe. Could this be the problem?
Pic attached shows system memory upon boot up; the other mem now stays at about 249,736 upon boot-up. soft and hard resets have no effect on it now.
Now this is getting annoying...grrr:(

[wrath of khan]

This is ClassicWB stuff here, not standard Amiga settings.  No idea.  Format the hard drive and reinstall your operating system.  Get rid of that ClassicWB crap.  Honestly, that's what I would do.  How did you get stuck with that, anyway?

This is what came on the cf card. Everything is set up, programs, whdload etc. If i format I lose everything.

I'll have to check if the damn cf card came loose inside the case, I guess...
Is there any command to get the system to boot from hardisk as a priority over floppy/df0? Scutterbucket!:)

[wrath of khan]

Why is your Workbench floppy inserted? It will boot from floppy if a floppy is inserted.
The screen shot you show above, was that booting from hard drive or floppy?
You don't need to alter any boot priorities, they are setup fine.

I see. Yes from floppy. I can only boot from floppy now it seems. When i copied the acatune to the C directory, this happened, after i did a soft reset.
I was checking to see if the other mem would disappear after a reset.

No clue, maybe some confliction with classic wb?

[wrath of khan]

Please boot from your Workbench floppy. Go into Workbench3.0 and then into Utilities, then load the program 'Multiview'. A file requester will appear. Press Volumes and go into drive DH0: ... then drawer 'S' ... then double click the file 'Startup-Sequence'. I'd like to see it.

j

[wrath of khan]

I'm sure a more experienced user could fix this in like, five minutes, if it was in front of them.  Did you buy the card pre-configured from someone?  Was it cheap?  You may just want to buy another one, and this time make NO CHANGES to it, other than to put the acatune command as the first line in the startup-sequence.

Heck, if it wasn't so expensive and time consuming, I'd almost say just mail me the CF card and I'll fix whatever you've got going on there.    Suffice it to say, I think one of those settings you accidentally changed messed up the startup of the thing.  And it probably is something really, really simple.  But really hard to diagnose via forums.  Man do I miss user's groups.  

Do you have any spare CF cards and set of Workbench disks perchance?

This is the one http://my.ebay.ie/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbay&gbh=1&CurrentPage=MyeBayWon&ssPageName=STRK:ME:LNLK:MEWNX
It cost me 70 euros in total. So not cheap. If all else fails I will send it to Paul.

[wrath of khan]

The ACATune line looks good. PM me and I'll reply with my postal address if you want me to sort it out for you. Like Mike says, I'm sure it's something simple that is wrong but hard for a novice to see. I'm on holiday in 8 days time however, so will need posting immediately and first class.

Is it still not booting at all from the CF drive? Or does it boot but go to a black screen?

Yup, it boots and then alternates between a black screen and a brown screen several times and then finally goes to a black screen.
Edit. I'll have to open the miggy up to take out the card, so i should check if it came loose, though i doubt it. Failing that I'll send it your way.

I need to untangle my brain after a long days work; I'll break out the screwdriver later.

[wrath of khan]

Well that is no bueno at all.  But it boots fine off floppy disk still?

Yep. It boots from floppy fine.

[wrath of khan]

You're saying it boots now, whereas before you said it was at the purple 'insert disk' type screen. Do you think then that putting the 'p' on the ACATune line to delay the startup is actually causing your black screen after it boots? If it is indeed booting from the hard drive now, try changing the ACATune line to just the basic option and cold boot:

C:ACATune >ram:acaoutput.txt

Or better still, before you do that just put a ';' at the beginning of the ACATune line so that it comments the line out (which means it will read the line as a comment and will not execute the ACATune command line). Your Startup-Sequence will then act as if the ACATune line isn't even there, so that we can see if you can boot correctly again without the ACATune line.

;C:ACATune -cache on - burst on....ETC

So, if booting from your Workbench floppy; to edit the CF Hard Drive Startup-Sequence you'd type 'ed dh0:s/startup-sequence' into a shell, or use the Execute Command in the Workbench menu.

Ok. I accessed the startup sequence via the shell, having booted from floppy. I removed the "P". I then turned the power brick off and then back on. It now goes straight to the insert floppy disc screen. There was no hardrive activity at all.

One curious thing, and Ive double checked, If put the W.B 3.1 floppy in the drive and then power on at the brick, It boots into the cf hardrive desktop.
Here the W.B 3.1 floppy icon is selectable. If I attempt to load anything via the cf desktop it says programs/tools not found etc. Here i can access the cfcard startup sequence via the w.b 3.1 floppy.

However, if I turn on the amiga at the brick and then insert the W.B 3.1 floppy, it boots staright into the W.B 3.1 floppy desktop. Here there is no visible sign of the cf desktop. Strange.
And here i cannot access the cfcard startup sequence via the w.b 3.1 floppy.

And yes indeed, adding the ";" to the startup sequence has fixed the cf card. Its working fine again. Damn good thinking chap!

But we are back to the same problem...I have to manually add the other mem via the maprom * command.

Perhaps the acatune startup command would have to be placed somewhere else in the startup sequence. Perhaps classic workbench is
loading something else first? Or there is some kind of confliction?

[wrath of khan]

adding the ";" semi-colon to the startup-sequence hasn't fixed anything. All it does is disable the command from running. Basically you're right back to square one again.

ACATune needs to be run as the first line in startup-sequence. It just has to. Well, I suppose it could be run later, but then you're loosing most of the benefits of the thing in the first place. I'm still going to go with "You have an incompatibility with ClassicWB" here, on this one. In one of your earlier screenshots you posted a picture of the first portion of your startup-sequence. This looks absolutely nothing like a normal Amiga startup-sequence should look, and included the line:

C:Execute S:Maxmem-Sequence

I have no idea what that is. Never heard of it, and is just one possible source of your compatibility issues.

Now personally I've never used ClassicWB and I never would. I think it's absolute rubbish, but that's just my .02 cents, I'm pretty opinionated about this stuff. I think you could get everything working perfectly if you went with a normal installation of Workbench. But barring that, you might want to start googling terms like "classicWB issues with ACA card". Maybe someone else has already had this same problem and there's an answer posted somewhere?

No luck googling...Perhaps i could message the e-bay seller, it was he who set up the card in the first place. Worth a try?

Lol. Googling "classic workbench issues with aca1233" brings up this thread...circular hilarity.

[wrath of khan]

It's good news that your system is still working after using the ';' to comment out the line. I did say though to try this afterwards (in your Startup-Sequence):

C:ACATune >ram:acaoutput.txt

This will simply add the extra memory at every boot.  So try that, and see if that works. We'll take it from there.

P.S. The maprom feature is nothing to do with adding the extra memory.

Ok. Will try this tomorrow. Lost myself in whdload games for a few hours...
Bedtime...

[wrath of khan]

It's good news that your system is still working after using the ';' to comment out the line. I did say though to try this afterwards (in your Startup-Sequence):

C:ACATune >ram:acaoutput.txt

This will simply add the extra memory at every boot.  So try that, and see if that works. We'll take it from there.

P.S. The maprom feature is nothing to do with adding the extra memory.

I tried this and it seemed to work. Upon a soft reset, ctrl,A+A the other mem remained and there was lots of it.
Sadly powering off at the brick and powering back on it did not work. The hardisk drive light attempts to load but just results in a black screen.

So, perhaps the line we added to the startup sequence is conflicting with the hardware boot-up but not the soft reset?
We are making progress at least.

What next maestro?

[wrath of khan]

I wonder if you've had issues with the reset signal on pin 1 of the ide cable as mentioned here under the 'Hard Drives' section:

 http://www.lysator.liu.se/amiga/hard/txt/a1200hardfaq.html

Or even the slow spin-up issue of Kickstart 3.0? Does anyone know if any of those issues are possible with a CF hard drive on the 1200's ide port?

When you say that the hard disk light attempts to load, does the light flicker in the same manner and for the same length of time as it does when it normally boots?

Also, when it's in this 'black screen' state, if you reset the Amiga and hold both mouse buttons down to get into the Amiga Early Startup Control; do your hard drive partitions show up? If they do, what happens if you select the button 'Boot with no Startup-Sequence'? Does it take you to the AmigaDOS prompt?

Not sure. It flickers quite a bit, so probably. Yes, I have accessed the amiga dos, just like you said.

[wrath of khan]

Ok, tomorrow when I get home from work I'm going to setup a CF card with ClassicWB Light and boot from it, confirm it's working, then I'll add the ACATune line in and see if I hit any problems. How's that for service?

Above and beyond the call of duty, my friend. Many thanks. I'm really enjoying my a1200 btw.
An indivision should make the games look really sweet on an lcd telly, when I get one that is.

[wrath of khan]

You're welcome. Anything to help a fellow Amigan...
 BTW, what revision is your A1200 motherboard? I'll be using a 1A. A 1A doesn't require timing fixes, but your board may well do, which could possibly be the problem... Or if it's not a problem with the booting issue it will certainly show itself up in WHDLoad with certain games freezing or with graphics corruption.

I'll open her up this evening and check the board revision. Its written on the board/pcb I'm told. I had some intro screens/menus flicking in and out, as in alternating between black screens and the image itself, but no in-game graphics corruption, thus far. It's worth checking though. I'm determined to get this 1200 up to spec, with all the bells and whistles. Just looking at it sitting on my desk, makes me happy.(How sad am I):laughing:

[wrath of khan]

You're in luck...

I replicated the issue. I can't upload a photo as I have no way to scale down a jpeg file to 97KB on my phone.

Solution:

Move the ACATune line to just above the 'C:GetMouseInput LOCAL'. So it'll look like this:

;ClassicWB Startup-Sequence
;--------------------------------
;LITE 3.1

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

C:ACATune -cache on -burst on -vbrmove -maprom * p >ram:acaoutput.txt
C:GetMouseInput LOCAL

IF $MouseInput EQ 1
...

It turns out that LoadModule doesn't appear to work if run after ACATune in this particular configuration, even if no extra options are added such as maprom. ACATune with no further options simply adds extra memory...but LoadModule doesn't appear to work with it in this way. But this makes sense really... Here we have an ACA1232/1233 that under Kickstart 3.0 doesn't configure all of its extra ram - it only configures 1MB. So after the ACATune command is run, followed by the LoadModule command, the machine resets and because we're running Kickstart 3.0 here the ram is lost and the Amiga configures 1MB again. This then appears to leave us with a black screen, although I was able to hold both mouse buttons down and boot with no startup-sequence and confirmed that the scsi.device was at 37.64 (standard with Kickstart 3.0). Of course, if the LoadModule command had worked then it would have been of a higher level.

There's no real reason for you to upgrade to Kickstart 3.1, but like I said earlier, you can use the ACATune command to softkick 3.1 and if you were to do this then remember to put the ACATune command line back to where it was - before LoadModule.

Also, what capacity is your CF Hard Drive? If it's 4GB which I suspect it is then the scsi.device shouldn't even be there on disk, and you could simply comment out the LoadModule line for a quick fix. If it is only 4GB, then the person who configured your setup has made an error which has cost us both a lot of time (ClassicWB by default doesn't use an upgraded disk based scsi.device, although it is optional).

Let me know how it goes...

Your an absolute star. I can't thank you enough. Its working now; I'm getting tons of other mem.Two soft resets and a hard reset and the other mem is still there.
Now that's more like it! It would have been a shame not to get the most out of my aca card.

The cfcard is 8 gigabytes btw.

It says in the readme that the aca can be used to simulate other system configs, i.e. a 1 meg amiga etc. I noticed some games for example apano sin don't run. Perhaps it requires a specific system set-up?

Anyhow; i guess I could use the acatune floppy to change the config as I needed it, to run a specific game? The setting would be erased upon powering the amiga off anyhow, I guess; and so the acatune startup line as we have it now would remain untouched?

Again thanks very much. And thanks to oldsmobile mike too.

I'll get myself a cd drive soon and then have a crack at setting up this easynet wireless thingy.