A590 vs Kickstart 1.3 questions

[countzero]

Recently I've managed to install a 1gb fujitsu drive into my A590. I'm using it with a 1.3 machine and 1.3.3 Workbench. I've some questions for this setup.

1- what is the maximum partition size I can use with the 1.3 roms/wb ?
2- I'm experiencing chip ram shortage. Games like hired guns just quit repoting insufficent chip memory. I've 2mb minimeg installed and 2mb on the a590, so is there a way I can use this as chip ram ?
3- The power connector for hd on the a590 has only three pins, 12v, 5v and one ground. Though modern harddrives need two ground lines. Should I make a connector which couples the ground line ? (feeding the same ground into both lines, is it dangerous ?) or would my hd be ok with a single ground line ? (currently I'm using it with the case open and standard pc psu with a standard connector.)

many thanks in advance

[motorollin]

countzero wrote:
2- I'm experiencing chip ram shortage. Games like hired guns just quit repoting insufficent chip memory. I've 2mb minimeg installed and 2mb on the a590, so is there a way I can use this as chip ram ?

Nope. You will have to boot without startup-sequence if you need more chip RAM, or use something like FBlit to try to load some workbench graphics in to Fast RAM instead of Chip. (not sure if this works on 1.3 though).

--
moto

[PaSha]

3- The power connector for hd on the a590 has only three pins, 12v, 5v and one ground. Though modern harddrives need two ground lines. Should I make a connector which couples the ground line ? (feeding the same ground into both lines, is it dangerous ?) or would my hd be ok with a single ground line ? (currently I'm using it with the case open and standard pc psu with a standard connector.)

Well, ground is ground. The two pins are most likely connected together on the Harddrive, so the A590 connector should work just fine.

If it doesn't, there is no danger in coupling the ground line to both ground pins. (they originate from the exact same place inside your PC PSU).

-Paul

[glitch]

Hi,

Try removing any extra utilities from your Startup-Sequence if you have any custom ones installed.  Addbuffers is one that can eat up some RAM.

On a more technical note, you might be able to change the "Mask" inside of the HDToolBox program for that drive and its partitions to ensure that the drive uses fast RAM instead chip for it's data transfers.  As well, check to see how many buffers you have set for each partition - the usual is 30.

Does anyone here have settings that they can forward for this device?

[patrik]

@countzero:
I think the problem is as simple as in 1.3 chip-memory per default had higher priority than fastmem (to aid in compability with som poorly written software and hence the reason for existance of the utility FastMemFirst) and because of that everything will be loaded info chipmem first. So try loading FastMemFirst very early in your S:Startup-Sequence and see if it makes a difference.

Don't worry about the single ground. First of all, the ground for power is the same, disgregarding if it is for 12V or 5V and second the two ground-pins are connected to eachother in the harddrive. Nevertheless it is imho a bit cheapskating and poor to just give the cable a single ground line.


/Patrik

[Piru]

@patrik

I think the problem is as simple as in 1.3 chip-memory per default had higher priority than fastmem (to aid in compability with som poorly written software and hence the reason for existance of the utility FastMemFirst) and because of that everything will be loaded info chipmem first. So try loading FastMemFirst very early in your S:Startup-Sequence and see if it makes a difference.

This is not true, chip memory always has lower priority than fast memory.

What FastMemFirst does is to have slower ranger memory ($C00000) *after* other fast memory. Ranger memory is pretty much as slow as chip memory, and some memory expansions don't have priority higher than this. So FastMemFirst is there to fix this condition. It's not needed if the expansion device is using proper priority (>0) for it's memory.

Thus FastMemFirst will not help in this situation.

[countzero]

glitch wrote:

On a more technical note, you might be able to change the "Mask" inside of the HDToolBox program for that drive and its partitions to ensure that the drive uses fast RAM instead chip for it's data transfers.  As well, check to see how many buffers you have set for each partition - the usual is 30.

Does anyone here have settings that they can forward for this device?

Hmm, this looks like a good idea. is there a way I can see where my fast ram is mapped in the address space, and use a corresponding mask ?

[Zac67]

Zorro fastmem runs from 0x200000 upwards, so with a mask of 0x0FFFFE you'd get word-aligned chipmem only. Since you've got no accelerator mem within 24 bit address space, you'd use a mask of 0xFFFFFE, i.e. any word-aligned memory withing the first 16 megs. RAM priority will take care of using fastmem first.

[TjLaZer]

You will want a Megachip type 2MB Chip Ram memory expander, but expect to pay around $80 or so.

With a 1GB HD I would use like a 200MB or so system partition and the rest as a data drive.

[countzero]

It seems like my cheap gigatron minimax had an option to register some of its ram as chip-ram. Today I noticed a pin on the gary adapter which says "FAT" on it and I figured out I should join it somewhere on agnus but where ? after some research I found out that it should be wired to jumper 2 near the kickrom (actually this jumper is pin 19? of agnus). So now I have 1 mb chip ram. But still I have problems. if I put a partition > 50mb, the keychecksum fails somewhere and I lose the whole partition. Also I noticed some games fail because I'm trying to run them on a NTSC Amiga with OCS chipset, and they mess the partition while craching as well. The best working games are Monkey Island's and Colonization, both of which work with even 512k chip. Pirates also works well. I guess a wb1.3 setup is not very rewarding, more difficult to maintain than I assumed.

[Zac67]

Sounds like you wired your RAM expansion for 1 MB chip (rather than 512K chip, 512K ranger) - but your Agnus can't handle it... That way you just get trashed graphics and a crashing system. If you configure 1 MB chipmem, ensure your Agnus is up to it (or replace it).