A question for any OS 4.0 Classic users on 604e's.....NOT Blizzard 603e's

[Hans_]

Kin-Hell wrote:
I'm using the Mediator 3.10 drivers under OS3.9 with the 8139 card. I am not running a DMA hack as far as I am aware.

Do you have any info about this hack please? The usual searches returned ziltch!

You are actually using the DMA hack because it's used by Elbox's Mediator drivers. I can't think of any good resources that explain what happens. Basically, the Mediator board can't DMA to main memory (I can't remember why). So what it does is it reserves some memory on your PCI graphics-card and uses PCI bus-mastering to DMA to memory of the PCI graphics-card. From there it can be copied to main memory. This is a hack as it's working around hardware limitations that prevent it from doing direct DMA. It also requires that you have a graphics-card present.

This means that every card that requires DMA in order to work requires special Mediator board code that differs from the driver used by other systems (e.g., the AmigaOne, whose north-bridge supports DMA to main memory). Basically, this would mean that every PCI card that uses DMA would need two drivers, one for PCI northbridges that support DMA, and a special one specifically for the Mediator boards. It's not a minor change to the drivers.

Hopefully Elbox will support their products and release OS4 versions of their drivers. In the mean time, I've been told that you can use the 68K Mediator drivers you use under OS3.9 on OS4 too, but you have to change ALL your PCI drivers to the 68K Mediator ones. You cannot mix the OS4 native and Mediator drivers. Alternatively, you could look for an 8029 card, which does work (and a bugfix for the driver is coming).

Hans

[Kin-Hell]

amiga4001 wrote:

I made a bracket to push down the ppc chip a bit to get it booting this works fine now.

The PPC Heatsink & fan should be held on via 2 x clips. On the backside of the PPC board, make sure these 2 x clips are ALL the way through. At the same time, I`d be checking, Cleaning & re-applying some thermal compound to the PPC Heatsink/Core interface. If doing all this means you still have the problem, make sure the whole PPC Cards Edge Connector is seated correctly on the motherboard connector.

Meantime, I`m trying to find out why an Installation of OS4 totally shafted an IBM 10,000 RPM hard drive. Since the re-boot from Installation, which went great including NOT seeing the copy files issue @ 7% (I formatted using long file names) I get a Software Guru screen. I have managed to hot-swap this drive whilst booting from floppy & deleted the installation partition. It`s still a no go here, but I can throw another 6 drives at it yet. Me thinks the drives RDB is Fux0rd!

[Kin-Hell]

Meantime is now by the by & all drives have healthy RDB`s again after much hot-swapping & tricking the Hard drive into thinking it was the original Hard drive seen by Media Toolbox. I picked up on another thread RE using SFS in order to support Long File Names under OS4, so theoretically, I was right about the RDB being shafted, even if I didn`t know the exact reason why.  :-? Now not so sure the Format should allow fux0ring of the RDB in this way. Surely it should say you need to install another File System able to cope with the long filenames or maybe I just mis-interperated the Quick Guide; Though it beats the cr4p out me as to where is the Full Manual??

So far, OS4.0 Classic has installed with a CVPPC card on a PC monitor right from the boot floppy. X-Surf is still a no go despite being plugged directly into a Zorro Slot without the Mediator even being in the same room!

Got lots more playing to do yet, but the hard drives are rcovered at least!  :roll: