New eFlasher available

[tjaoz]

@platon42

Sorry, I can't resist some trolling...

No need to be sorry. Everyone here knows that you attack Elbox when you only can. You are like a puppy barking all the time when hearing that Elbox again did something for Amiga users.  You must suffer knowing that, despite your 'wishes', Elbox customers may count on new updates and new products.

also updating the exec.library, which is a bit tricky! Can anyone confirm eFlash supports this?

Bad news for you: eFlash 4000 SUPPORTS updating exec.library during booting.

Oh right. Give some proof, will ya? Algor reads the flash memory at full
Zorro II speed, which is 2.8 MB/sec.

Only 2.8MB/s with Algor?

Well-designed Zorro II cards (e.g. Picasso IV) can easily reach transfers much over 3MB/s. Not to mention Zorro II cards supporting Fast Zorro II transfers in ZIV boards.

Zorro III does >30MB/sec in non-DMA mode?

Which processor card for A3/4000 supports transfers over 30 MB/s from Zorro III slots in non-DMA mode?

I wonder -- where did Elbox get this information from? The Algor has the

Who is talking here about Zorro II controllers of the outdated USB 1.1 standard?

It follows clearly from the text that the point is about Flash Zorro II cards, that is that the description refers to KickFlash cards. I saw such a card. Its producer went so far in savings in production costs that both Flash memory modules in the card are connected to the same eight data lines of the Zorro II connector. Thus he saved some 0.50 EUR on PCB costs... and at the same time cut Zorro II reading speed by half.

Again, is Elbox selling products for more than they're worth?

Who gave you right to say about the value of someone else's work?

You'd better remain with estimating value of the product in whose preparation you participated yourself? Maybe that are Algor cards (for over 100 EUR), which are sold 'for more than they're worth?'

User comments haven't been positive so far.

You can read in news lists that a definite majority of comments from users of Elbox products is very positive. I also have only positive impressions from using Elbox products, which I have many.

[tjaoz]

@NightShade737

Soooo, how fast is it? Really...

Bustest reports 16 MB/s here.

[tjaoz]

@mboehmer_e3b

Ah. Finally. Let's train some rats...

Referring to somebody's family name in the way you are doing it does not give you evidence of culture and education.

What else could one expect from a baloon-mind like you?

Lection I: synchronous busses. Zorro II is a purely synchronous bus. This means, each bus transaction is based on a fixed clock (in Zorro II PAL machines, this is 7.14MHz). Each bus access is 4 clocks long. You cannot get faster that the clock given by the master. Picasso IV is not working as bus master in Zorro II modus.
So, enlighten me...

If you want it, I will try to enlighten you:

Just imagine there are backplanes, which in the Zorro II mode support block transfer mode. They do not add any additional clocks to divide the bus accesses during longword reads.

How Zorro II cycles look like in such backplanes you can see in this drawing from the Individuals website.

A well designed Zorro II card achieves over 3MB/s in such backplanes.

Lection II:
Zorro IV modus. It is not "Zorro". It's some patchwork done by Elbox (by doubling the bus clock, AFAIK). Unfortunately not even Elbox itself is supporting this patch anymore.

Anymore?

As far as I know Elbox has never produced any Zorro II cards. Elbox all the time supports ZIV busboards, producing cards/boards, which are to be installed in much faster ZIV slots: Mediator ZIV, FastATA IV.

Lection III:
Speed. Reading 1MByte (or 8MBit as Elbox is proud to say) in Zorro II mode takes 1/3 second, in Zorro III mode is claimed 1/16s. Wuha. Add the mandatory reset time needed by the eFlash, and compare again. Or leave it out - can you distinguish between both times without a test program ?

I have already heard it. Why should one make a USB 2.0 controller if one can make slow USB 1.1 one?

Does it matter that USB 1.1 (it means without Hi-Speed mode) are no longer produced to other computers?
You show that accessories to computers may be sold like antique goods. The slower this thing, the more you can ask for it ;-)

Did you just "see" it or backward engineer it ?

Connection Flash data lines to the half of the Zorro data lines is clear from the first sight.
You would rather need backward engineering to find it out? :-)

Wow. I'm impressed. You don't know a thing about synchronous busses and are able to draw such conclusions ?

Again you seem to be omniscient to yourself.

It is normal for someone working at Elbox to have their products...

I do not work in Elbox. I do not know if anyone from Elbox uses Amiga at home.

[tjaoz]

@mboehmer_e3b

A remark on Zorro II bus speed: you have 7.14MHz clock, with four clocks building up a standard bus cycle. There is no block transfer mode in Zorro II, so add one clock to divide the bus accesses. You end up with five clock cycles of 140ns each => you can transfer a 16bit word in 700ns (assuming that nobody else wants access to the bus).

Here we go: (5x 140ns)^(-1) x 2bytes = 2.72 MB/s

As I wrote you earlier, there are Zorro II backplane implementations where the busmaster does not need to lose the 5th clock cycle when reads are done in longwords.

[tjaoz]

@Rassilon

Don't you know that Hodges is severely obsessed with Elbox?

He attacked them even in his own homepage. Since December his website news read:

'Registration process is open again, mainly for ArakAttack, but poor Spider sods won't be rejected anymore. I hope a certain company will go out of business anyway soon.'

[tjaoz]

@BR

No matter what I flash, if the boot jumper is set nothing works.

So the problem arises when you switch on the eFlash booting option?  
What programs have you stored in the Flash?

[tjaoz]

@platon42

Yeah, they're counting... like the number of months that have passed after announcing products like the SharkPPC

You have not notices that OS4 has not been released so far?
They made it clear many times that there will be no Shark before OS is released.

Or the MPEG decoder TV drivers, announced last year.

Yes, they have been working on this support for months. I know how much time their programmers devoted to it.

One think you can be sure: such support will never appear for any other Amiga PCI. Noone else is willing to spend so many time and efforts on preparing new drivers.

Or any functional (!) (that means, not mere bugfixing) driver update within the last six months.

Funny you are.

You are running so fast that you have not noticed that you comment on a news informing about new software from Elbox.

Or are they counting the number of lockups of the 100mbit drivers

I have a 100Mbps card and I have not had any lockup for over a year. You must change your anty-Elbox FUDs' issues. That one is very outdated.

or the lockups that occur with Warp3D?

Elbox paid for preparing Warp 3D for Mediators, but Warp 3D was prepared by Hyperion and not by Elbox. So if you want to spread gossips about bugs in this software, you should rather find a different thread.

Any proof for this? You don't have any credibility here.

Your credibility is null in your attacks against Elbox. You have proved many times that public spreading of lies on them is your best part.

Well, didn't Elbox say that their card does over ten times the bandwidth than other zorro II flashrom solutions?

Read again the Elbox statment. Elbox did not write 'other flashrom solution'.

Elbox wrote about 'Flash Zorro II cards' and, which is clear from the description, thought about Kickflash cards, which run at half the Algor's speed, that is up to 1.4 MB/s.

As this includes the Algor, and the Algor does 2.8MB/sec, Elbox claim to have about 30MB/sec transfer rate.

1.4 MB/s x 10 = 14 MB/s if you cannot count it yourself...

Elbox is talking about "flash solutions"

Can you indicate the place in the announcement where this is used?

You haver a strange habit of declaring others stating things they have never stated. Only for the reason to immediately criticise them for this not existing statement.

Who gave that right to YOU? You were the one that started all that constantly non-Elbox product bashing!

Was I the first one to talk?
No. As usually that is you, who started bashing an Elbox product in this thread.

Many times in the past I saw your statements on Spider prices. It was always you who started bashing.

So I'm just shooting back.

You speak exactly like Mr. Bush a year ago.

[tjaoz]

@platon42

Some just *are* plain false information. Like:

FlashROM memory installed in the eFlash 4000 card allows also direct execution of programs stored in this memory without the necessity of copying programs code to the system Fast memory.

This is plain wrong

What is wrong? eFlash 4000 card hardware allows this.

-- because 99,999% of the programs on the Amiga are *not* PC relative binaries and need to be relocated.

Do you really not understand what Elbox is about in this text?
 
This is a HARDWARE feature that eFlash 4000 FlashROM memory area is available in the processor data and program space. This allows preparation of such programs/procedures, which may be executed directly in the Flash memory. Of course, this does not limit starting programs in the standard way with copying them to RAM.

I get from your tone that no FlashROM Zorro II offers such capacity :-)
Algor FlashROM is available ONLY in the processor data space?

Another example? They claiming that booting off USB mass storage devices works.

What a cheat of you.

In your first comment for the news you wrote:

"When drivers are available"? So this doesn't work yet? Booting from USB works for Algor since a year now.

Now you are writing that they are writing it works. You contradict yourself.
 
Schisofrenia?

Elbox never do this dirty work themselves.

Dirty work is what you are doing. I saw many places, where you attacked Elbox. I never saw Elbox attacking you.

To recall one of your attacks on them: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/highway_usb/message/847
And their response: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/highway_usb/message/870

They have Rat aka Tjaoz for this purpose.

I'm a free person and I live in a free country. I am fully responsible for my statements and opinions.

If any company tried influence me, well, Michael Boehmer from E3B tried to frighten me in his private email to make me change my words on Algor. I do not want to listen to him. I always try to base my statements on verifiable facts.

read about redrumloa buying the Prometheus stock on amiga.org and ann.lu

Prometheus *stock* is still in the ITR company in Warsaw, which assembled them 3 years ago.
All I wrote in amiga.org and ann.lu about Prometheus cards is true. (Amiga.org has censorship and delete all negative posts about Prometheus.)

Moreover, Elbox will be gone at the end of April anyway

Elbox "will be gone at the end of April"?

Are you planning an attack? Bombing them or hitting a plane in their building? I always thought you were a terrorist.

Are you from Al-Qaida?

[tjaoz]

@platon42  

> I have a 100Mbps card and I have not had any lockup for over a year. You must change your anty-Elbox FUDs' issues. That one is very outdated.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga-Mediator/messagesearch?query=lockup
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga-Mediator/messagesearch?query=100mb

Nice try, Rat

You entered "lockup" in the search engine and you think no-one will check these posts?

These posts found by you confirm only my words:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga-Mediator/message/16974
'When using DHCP in MiamiDX there is a known bug with lease renewal. I had this problem myself. You need to get a router and disable lease renewal or set it to its max time. I had to set mine to 9999999 in the time. Since I started using the router and did this I havent has a single lockup problem or a disconnect with my 8039 card.'

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga-Mediator/message/16975
'I used to have lockup problems but as Elbox have upgraded their drivers over the past year or so I no longer have any problems at all.'

Strange that these bugs only occur on the Mediator, huh?

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga-Mediator/messagesearch?query=warp

Only on the Mediator?
No wonder, if you are looking for posts on Warp3D in the Mediator ML, you will find there posts on Mediator.

Search other MLs and you will find Warp3D problems with other hardware. Check the G-REX ML, you will be amazed how many problems are there.

Or, instead of posting comments on wrong operation of Warp3D, contact Hyperion - they are responsible for Warp3D...
You do not have a Mediator or Warp3D to it?
Oooops... I forgot that you are mostly in spreading gossips.

[tjaoz]

@BR

Yes, only when the boott jumper is on. The only thing I've flashed is what the installation script asks if you want flashed,
the OS Rom Update.

Try to program FlashROM from Shell. First do this: eFlasher ROMUPDATE. Then switch ON the eFlash booting. Is it working OK?

[tjaoz]

@Schoenfeld

The distance between the two accesses is short, yes, but the distance to the next longword-access is the same as between two single word accesses, so the gain is minimal, and the gain is the same on *all* Zorro II implementations.

You may wrongly understood what your logic analyzer showed or you do not understand what we are talking about here.

You can see from this image that reading of the longword from PIC in this backplane lasts for 8 clock cycles. If, as you say, the break from the end of longword reading to starting the next reading is standard, that is one clock cycle, it means that readings of longwords start every 9 clock cycles. The speed of reading the PIC card in this Zorro II backplane is:

4 (bytes) * 7.14 MHz / 9 cycles = 3.17 MB/s

3.17 MB/s is rather higher from 2.8 MB/s, which Hodges thinks is the maximum possible Zorro II reading speed...

Now let's go for some content: Elbox claims that executing code is possible without copying into memory. Sorry guys, the Amiga roms *always* copy the Zorro-roms into ram, and execute it there.

You misunderstood that text to which you are referring. Read it again and read my post to Hodges on it.

Double-standard: Mediator1200 uses banking, and that's OK.

Mediator 1200 must use banking due to the design of turbo cards for A1200. If A1200 turbo cards had all 32 address lines led to the CPU connector, then there will be no banking in Mediator 1200. Fortunately, the window is quite large, 8MB, so its switching in normal operations is quite rare.

My Kickflash uses banking, and that's bad. I wonder why.

The window in Kicklash is very small (16kB), but I think it does not matter. The BASIC thing is that both Flash chips are in Kickflash connected to the same 8 data lines. This reduces the maximum speed of reading from Kickflash to 1.4 MB/s.

Speed: Kickflash has 1MB, and copying that to memory takes a little over half a second. It saves you a reboot, meaning on some systems it saves a good 40 seconds.

Could you specify the config in which Kickflash saves 40 s?