Symptoms of timing problems

[Matt_H]

Fusion is crashing on my A1200. At first, I wasn't surprised, since it's not the most stable piece of software on the planet. But after eliminating all potential software problems (virtually base install of 3.9.2), the only problem left I see is hardware. The Blizzard1260 and SCSI Kit in the machine I know to be good, as I used them in another 1200 previously. The hard drive is good, the floppy drive is good, the only thing different about this setup is that this is a Rev 2B board (possible timing issues), and my other was a 1D.1 (no timing issues).

Since it is emulation software tied heavily to the Amiga chipset, could it be timing problems that are preventing me from getting this going? The exact symptom is that the system locks completely as soon as the Fusion Control Window pops up on the Workbench.

[Piru]

Since it is emulation software tied heavily to the Amiga chipset, could it be timing problems that are preventing me from getting this going? The exact symptom is that the system locks completely as soon as the Fusion Control Window pops up on the Workbench.

The emulation isn't really tied to custom chipset, it's much more CPU bound. If it was heavily chipset bound, Fusion wouldn't get much faster with 060 compared to 030 for example.

Anyway, Fusion is very shoddy piece of sw, it easily can trip over to itself. I find it unlikely mobo timing problems would show up like this.

Curiously, ShapeShifter always was very stable...

[orange]

Maybe it would be a good thing to make that timing fix, anyway.
I had problem with a1200 for YEARS. It would freeze if used 15 min after cold boot. But if left alone, after 15 min, everything worked fine. So I did the timing fix, although it was a "long shot" and VERY unlikely solution. Surprisingly, A1200 works now. It has some minor problems, like when exiting YAM system crashes and screen gets blue (custom chips), but its much better than before. :-)

[Matt_H]

By tied to the chipset, I meant that it relied heavily on the Amiga's native architecture (yeah, there were P96 drivers, but bear with me). The odds of getting this going under OS4/MOS seem very, very small.

I'll give it a shot on the 1D.1 board when I get some free time.

The only reason I preferred Fusion to ShapeShifter was that it was slightly faster and had the option to force the emulation to quit if the Mac side crashed/hung.

Will try ShapeShifter later tonight. Anyone ever used Basilisk?

[adolescent]

I couldn't get Fusion 3.2 running at all with BB2 (I couldn't even get out of the config).  I had to switch to ShapeShifter.  Luckily my hardfile worked just fine with SS.  

The exact same configuration worked fine under OS3.9 (no-BBs).  I guess the emulation improvements added to the BBs are breaking something.

[zipper]

> I couldn't get Fusion 3.2 running at all with BB2 (I couldn't even get out of the config). I had to switch to ShapeShifter. Luckily my hardfile worked just fine with SS.


That's because of BB2's added support for rsrvwarm/cold (Fusion) or prepareemul (Shapeshifter) memory patches. But sadly it doesn't work with Fusion...
So I have an alternate boot partition for Fusion with an older Amigaos Rom Update.