GVP HC+8 and FaaastROM questions

[MskoDestny]

I recently acquired a second GVP Impact Series II HC+8 and a FaaastROM upgrade(thanks to leirbag28) and now I have some questions.

The new HC+8 is a revision 5 and my old one is a revision 2.  Are there any advantages to the newer board revision?

I seem to remember there were some issues with using these cards with A4000s (and I suppose A3000s as well) because Fast RAM isn't mapped into the ZII address space making DMA problematic.  I also seem to remember there was some hack that largely got around this.  Can anyone point me in the right direction?  Also, is there an advantage to adding RAM to the card's onboard SIMM slots?  amiga.resource.cx seems to suggest that the board can DMA from the drive faster to it's own RAM than it can going over the Zorro bus.

What does the FaaastROM do exactly?  The box seems to suggest some performance improvements, but nothing specific.  How can I tell if a particular HC+8 card already has this installed?

[Rod_cl]

Hi MskoDestny:
did you get any help with your post?
I'm facing some problems with the controller myself.
Best Regards

Rod

[Tahoe]

There are indeed problems with DMA performance in a 4000, the easiest fix being adding some memory to the card. I remember doing the same thing with my A2091. There was a updated version (the A4008HC8) which had an internal patch I believe, but still it wasn't a sprinter.

Faaaastrom is basically the normal BOOT rom from GVP holding the gvpscsi.device. The improved rom you might be thinking of was the GuruROM by mr. Babel.

[Cyberus]

Funny, I thought it was in fact 'Faaaaaaaaaaaaaaastrom' ;-)

Yeah, as Tahoe says, the card shipped with the original GVP RO
And as he also says, the 'improved' ROM is the GuruROM

[patrik]

@Tahoe:

Yeah, a Zorro2 controller is by nature a bad thing in a Zorro3 system as cant dma to the 32-bit fastram where the cpu need to have the data to be able to process it fast.


/Patrik