DENEB various small issues

[platon42]

bash64 wrote:

I'm not sure why the guys at E3B feel that every customer issue is an outright ATAAAAACK on them

There is a difference between a customer who says "I have this issue here, these are the circumstances, can you please help me?" and somebody who comes yelling "F*cking b*llsh*t, this piece of junk that I spend my last money and the whole weekend doesn't work and is driving me crazy, fix it, you idiots, before I throw the machine out of the window or pass by at your homes with the thing so you can see it for yourself" (okay that was slightly exaggerated, but you should get the gist of it).

Do you get your head bitten off on a regular basis by a nagging wife?
[rest of pointless rant skipped]

That was uncalled for.

I'm not your enemy, I'm your customer and I wish you would put down your fists and stop trying to box with me.

If you'd just for once behave less like an enemy who is just on the verge of mud slinging in public forums... well, then...

PS: Indeed your "support queries" already costed me hours of time that I'd honestly rather spend for something different. Pointless? Maybe. You tell me.

[Trev]

I ordered a Deneb from AmigaKit yesterday, so I now feel entitled to my two cents worth of commentary. ;-)

Regarding Installer: The Installer executable is freely distributable pursuant to the terms in Installer.license and Germany's current export laws. (Has any incarnation of Amiga ever revoked that license?) Apart from storage limitations (Installer is huge!), it seems reasonable to include it with any installation that requires it. That's the most user-friendly approach, obviously.

Regarding MUI: C'est la vie. MUI is a near de facto standard with the unfortunate property of having an acronym that's the same as one used by Microsoft, although I gather SASG used it first. Hopefully, the Deneb documentation directs the end user to http://www.sasg.com/mui or another appropriate location. I don't have MUI installed at the moment, but I suppose now's the time to get it done.

I once commented on the total cost of ownership of an Amiga system, including registration charges for the most commonly used system and user applications. It's a bit ludicrous. ;-)

I'm looking forward to receiving my Deneb. (I also joked about choosing a new nVidia display adapter over a Deneb. I guess I needed both of them.) It's replacing my Kickflash, which unfortunatley, doesn't support the MAPROM feature on the Blizzard 1260.

[Darrin]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

And believe me, almost 90% of all customer support requests are caused by not reading the manual (which did take us also some time to create).

This creates a big and completely unnecessary overhead in support, which keeps us away from our normal business.

Maybe you can imagine that this makes us angry, sometimes - as time is a resource which cannot be replaced by money, or anything else in the world.

Michael

Oh, I completely understand and I always appreciate any help you and the reset of the team behind the Deneb (or any other device) give in these forums.

I also hope you realise that sometimes following the manual isn't quite as easy for some of us as the people behind making the manual believe.  With so many variations of hardware and software on the Amiga combining to produce some unwanted side effects then asking questions in a thread like this can be far less painful than wading through a text file for one sentence amongst a thousand.

For example, I was unaware of the conflict between the Deneb and the Cybervision 64/3D which had me banging my head agaist a wall for several hours.  Is it mentioned in the manual?  I've no idea, but I never noticed it.  I found out because I happened to catch Chris H posting some advice on the Deneb and I asked him.  He was good enought to let me know about the problem and let me know that there was beta firmware for the Deneb being worked on.  Thanks to that, I went searching the Deneb website for an update around a month later, found and installed the v9 firmware and posted a thread for others to read letting them know that it works perefectly.

Please don't stop posting advice in these threads.  I know people (including myself) need to read the manuals more, but most of us post here to quiz other users and to get step-by-step guides on making stuff work.  I've posted a guide to getting a USB Ethernet device working because I hope it will be useful to others and hopefully answer more questions than it creates.

I will agree that the tone used at times when questioning aspects of the Deneb are grossly unfair and probably make you wonder why you even bothered to market such a device, but I'm sure it's just down to excessive frustration.  I've finally got my A4000 working as I want it too, but 've lost count of how many times I had to install OS3.x from scratch.  Even now I've run two wires from the Deneb rescue jumpers to the outside of the case so that I can twist them together should my installation go tits-up again.

I know one thing though, I wouldn't give up my Deneb card for the world!   :-)

[quenthal]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

And believe me, almost 90% of all customer support requests are caused by not reading the manual (which did take us also some time to create).

Deneb came with a manual?...
:-P

Trev wrote:

I'm looking forward to receiving my Deneb. (I also joked about choosing a new nVidia display adapter over a Deneb. I guess I needed both of them.) It's replacing my Kickflash, which unfortunatley, doesn't support the MAPROM feature on the Blizzard 1260.

I replaced Kickflash too with Deneb. I used to have sometimes problems with cold boot (additional reboot with Ctrl-A-A made that problem always go away, but even that annoyed me). This happened when using custom kickstart I put together with Romsplit/Remus with Kickflash. With Deneb these issues are completely gone.

[amigakit]

Thank you Trevor for your order- much appreciated.

FedEx have it now.

[Trev]

@quenthal

Mine just goes into a reset loop when trying to use ROM remapping. Jens told me Coyote Flux didn't have a Blizzard 1260 for testing, which is understandable given the Kickflash's original target market of Amiga OS 4 users with Blizzard/Cyberstorm PPC accelerators. Changes in Amiga Inc.'s plans for a new Kickstart ROM obviously left Jens in a difficult marketing position.

I'll probably keep it around for testing clockport software, but if anyone needs or wants a Kickflash, I might be interested in a trade (no cash) of some sort.

@amigakit

Awesome.

[Darrin]

amigakit wrote:
Thank you Trevor for your order- much appreciated.

FedEx have it now.

Are the Catweasle Mk4 PCI shipping yet?

[amigakit]

Not yet, later this month.

[mboehmer_e3b]

I ordered a Deneb from AmigaKit yesterday, so I now feel entitled to my two cents worth of commentary. ;-)

Nice to hear, despite the fact that there's a bad guy at E3B doing the support :-)

Germany's current export laws. (Has any incarnation of Amiga ever revoked that license?) Apart from storage limitations

Wuha... ever ordered something in US? Never?
I ordered some schottky diodes there, and was asked by a phone call half an hour later if I planned to bring down the US government using these diodes... (for god's sake, I didn't tell them that I studied nuclear physics, who knows what would have happened then...).
So, if you feel like moaning about German laws, then start with the Stiftung EAR or the GEZ issue, that's really unique in the world :-/

I once commented on the total cost of ownership of an Amiga system, including registration charges for the most commonly used system and user applications. It's a bit ludicrous. ;-)

Hope the full OEM license of Poseion helps your balance here a little bit.

Michael

[mboehmer_e3b]

I'll probably keep it around for testing clockport software, but if anyone needs or wants a Kickflash, I might be interested in a trade (no cash) of some sort.

Well, for testing hardware it seems reasonable - please PM me on mboehmere3bde and tell me what expect for it.

Michael

[Darrin]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

Hope the full OEM license of Poseion helps your balance here a little bit.

Michael

Personally speaking, that was the #1 selling point of the Deneb over the previous USB solutions for me.  It's a win-win situation as far as you and the consumer goes, the software is included in the hardware and goes with the hardware when it's sold so no mucking around with online registration, keyfiles or worrying whether you can get a second hand device working, plus you don't need to worry about piracy.  The auto update feature rocks too (now that my A4000 is online) and the idea of setting the jumpers so that a "drive" containing the software appears is just bliss.

[mboehmer_e3b]

With so many variations of hardware and software on the Amiga combining to produce some unwanted side effects then asking questions in a thread like this can be far less painful than wading through a text file for one sentence amongst a thousand.

I fully agree, as you give the best example (CV643D) here.

For example, I was unaware of the conflict between the Deneb and the Cybervision 64/3D which had me banging my head agaist a wall for several hours.  Is it mentioned in the manual?  I've no idea, but I never noticed it.  I found out because I happened to catch Chris H posting some advice on the Deneb and I asked him.

Well, I didn't know about this issue myself unless it was reported by several people, and we needed some time to get this issue down to the CV64/3D interface. We have many test cards here, but no CV64/3D, so we had to borrow one from our customers, and after having it in the test lab connected to the logic analyzer it was a matter of one hour to trigger the problem, analyse it and fix it in the firmware of DENEB.

To give you some insight on this issue: Zorro III multiplexes address and data lines (24bit multiplexed, 8bit data direct, 6 bit address direct). During a Zorro III access, the bus master puts up the address on the bus, waits a short period in time, and turns the /FCS strobe signal from high to low; this falling edge validates the addresses, the addressed Zorro III card activates /SLAVE, and shortly after the falling edge of /FCS the multiplexed address lines turn to data lines.
The CV64/3D, unfortunately, does not support the maximum allowed timing at this point as defined by the spec; it seems the hardware designer kept to "observed behaviour".
Simply said, the CV64/3D is too slow at this point of the access - while the DENEB uses the defined timings ("slow" Zorro III accesses from CPU card via Buster).

By this, the CV64/3D misinterprets the data on DMA cycles done by the DENEB as address information, and depending on the data direction of the transfer data is scrambled or simply turned to 0xffffffff - which leads to serious troubles with USB operation, of course.

So we stumbled across some old bug in the CV64/3D which only occurs during certain data transfers, and only in certain situations.

Luckily I decided early in the development phase to switch from a CPLD to a much more versatile FPGA device, which easily supports upgrading the firmware by simply reflashing some FlashROM - by this decision we are flexible enough to provide hotfixes in such cases without sending in the cards, changing CPLD chips or other cost and time intensive actions.

installed the v9 firmware and posted a thread for others to read letting them know that it works perefectly.

That's what it's intended to do :-)

I know one thing though, I wouldn't give up my Deneb card for the world!   :-)

Nice to hear :-)

Michael

[mboehmer_e3b]

Personally speaking, that was the #1 selling point of the Deneb over the previous USB solutions for me.  It's a win-win situation as far as you and the consumer goes, the software is included in the hardware and goes with the hardware when it's sold so no mucking around with online registration, keyfiles or worrying whether you can get a second hand device working, plus you don't need to worry about piracy.

Hm, having a second hand Mediator from the SUBWAY test phase I  have learned about the joy of being a "second hand" customer, so this was not an option for DENEB.

The auto update feature rocks too (now that my A4000 is online) and the idea of setting the jumpers so that a "drive" containing the software appears is just bliss.

Well, blame Chis for that. The FPGA firmware images are quite small, and the firmware FlashROM is quite big, so it was kind of natural way to implement this feature.
Even with four different firmware images stored in FlashROM there is plenty of space...
If I had killed the watchdog in the FPGA many people would have had an easier start, but with the CS MKii and the kickstart bug in expansion.library it seemed as a good idea to have some last resort (by having the FPGA deactivating the FlashROM).
Looking back, it was not a good decision, but this has been changed in firmware V8 and V9 (user can deactivate FlashROM by reset length).

Michael

[Darrin]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

I fully agree, as you give the best example (CV643D) here.

Well, I didn't know about this issue myself unless it was reported by several people, and we needed some time to get this issue down to the CV64/3D interface. We have many test cards here, but no CV64/3D, so we had to borrow one from our customers, and after having it in the test lab connected to the logic analyzer it was a matter of one hour to trigger the problem, analyse it and fix it in the firmware of DENEB.

So we stumbled across some old bug in the CV64/3D which only occurs during certain data transfers, and only in certain situations.

I'm really glad you fixed that bug so quickly.  I had actually resigned myself to just using AGA as I had decided that USB was more useful than RTG.  It would also have been easy to say, "Well, it's the CV64/3D that's at fault" and just ignored it so I think you deserve a gold star for service and support for addressing the bug and fixing it.

Luckily I decided early in the development phase to switch from a CPLD to a much more versatile FPGA device, which easily supports upgrading the firmware by simply reflashing some FlashROM - by this decision we are flexible enough to provide hotfixes in such cases without sending in the cards, changing CPLD chips or other cost and time intensive actions.

And that's another bonus.  The upgrade to v8 and/or v9 is quick and painless AS LONG AS THE USER READS THE INSTRUCTIONS.

[Trev]

@mboehmer_e3b

Wuha... ever ordered something in US? Never?
I ordered some schottky diodes there, and was asked by a phone call half an hour later if I planned to bring down the US government using these diodes... (for god's sake, I didn't tell them that I studied nuclear physics, who knows what would have happened then...).
So, if you feel like moaning about German laws, then start with the Stiftung EAR or the GEZ issue, that's really unique in the world :-/

Diodes? You should have told them you were building energy efficient mind control devices. You could have made millions of dollars as a US government contractor.

I was just paraphrasing from the Installer license agreement, which was written by Escom. My point was that anyone can distribute the Installer executable with their Installer scripts, assuming there is enough space on the installation media. :-)

I live in the US, so I have not had difficulty ordering electronics from US companies. ;-) I have had problems with US customs holding up hardware that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft consider questionable. (*sigh* I miss liksang.com.) I understand your point, though. We are a bit draconian with regard to electronics exports.

FedEx tells me I will receive my Deneb tomorrow morning. As long as customs doesn't think I'll be using it to write homebrew Gameboy software, it should arrive on time.

Trev

[mboehmer_e3b]

I'm really glad you fixed that bug so quickly.  I had actually resigned myself to just using AGA as I had decided that USB was more useful than RTG.  It would also have been easy to say, "Well, it's the CV64/3D that's at fault" and just ignored it so I think you deserve a gold star for service and support for addressing the bug and fixing it.

If I just could trigger the Buster 11 bug (lockup with several busmasters on Zorro III) in a reliable way, and maybe add some bugfix into the DENEB FPGA also... but this is a long term project, if spare time allows... :-(

Michael