EEPROM on A1200?

[orange]

a word of warning: it took Willem MONTHS to send me ordered 40pin adapter for 27c400. by that time I have already found it from local seller.

its a very popular programmer and you can probably find it somewhere near you to save postage costs.. etc.


BTW, EEPROMs are electricaly erasable so (unlike 27c400 EPROM) they dont need UV rays and don't have little window.

[motorollin]

Thanks for the warning - I'll try to find a local reseller. So:

ROM = Read Only Memory
PROM = Programmable Read Only Memory
EPROM = Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (erase by UV)
EEPROM = Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (erase by erase function of programmer)



Right?

--
moto

[Oliver]

right.

also, UV erasers are extra hassle and cost.

I believe there is also a 2716 eprom being used as a replacement chip for arcade machines using the same chips as the amiga kick roms.  the 2716 needs a simple adapter though.

[motorollin]

Well it looks like a no-go anyway :-( I downloaded Doobrey's RomSplit and Remus applications. I used RomSplit to read my 3.1 Kickstart and save its contents. I also split the OS3.9 ROM Update.

I then loaded Remus and tried to add the 3.1 kickstart files and the 3.9 ROM update files, but it said there wasn't enough space :-( Looks like there's not enough space in 512k for everything!

--
moto

[Doobrey]

@Motorollin
 I normally remove workbench.library from ROM, and leave the 3.9 wb in libs:
 to make more space, also if that still doesn't leave enough room you could leave the 3.1 bootmenu in ROM as the 3.9 one is 13kb bigger.

 Just done a little test,
 Updated all residents from 3.9bb2 and no workbench leaves 37kb free
 Updated all except bootmenu and no workbench leaves about 50kb free.

Using EEPROMS should be fine, I've run the 'new' ROMS from flash on my A1200 and in E-UAE without problems.

A word of warning though, several people have reported big problems when using 3.9bb2's execv45, but have said that it works fine when they swapped it for Piru's Exec44...but Sod's law comes into play cos I can't reproduce the problem here  :roll:

[rare_j]

motorollin wrote:
Well it looks like a no-go anyway :-( I downloaded Doobrey's RomSplit and Remus applications. I used RomSplit to read my 3.1 Kickstart and save its contents. I also split the OS3.9 ROM Update.

I then loaded Remus and tried to add the 3.1 kickstart files and the 3.9 ROM update files, but it said there wasn't enough space :-( Looks like there's not enough space in 512k for everything!

--
moto

According to the BlizKick docs, there's only 86 bytes or something spare in the A1200's 3.1 ROM.
This sounded like a fun project, but really, Blizkick only adds something like 8 seconds to bootup time from a cold boot, and it has an option to add as much free space as you like to your ROM once it is in fastram.

[motorollin]

@Doobrey
Are there any other libraries I can safely leave out? I'll be using my Blizzard SCSI interface, so can I remove scsi.device? Also, I don't use the PCMCIA slot. Can I remove the card device and resource?

Cheers

--
moto

[_yak_]

Uhm, it's probably a dumb question. I don't know where is the ROM mapped in the memory but is it possible to use a bigger EEPROM chip? :roll:

[motorollin]

I don't think so. If a bigger Kickstart ROM is used then it overlaps chip RAM. Softkickers and BlizKick use fast RAM allocated safely for the kickstart image.

--
moto

[Doobrey]

_yak_ wrote:
Uhm, it's probably a dump question. I don't know where is the ROM mapped in the memory but is it possible to use a bigger EEPROM chip? :roll:

Yup :-)
 That's how I started out experimenting building my own ROMS, I just built an image containing all the relevant parts of the rom update into a 512kb rom, and added it to UAE as an extended ROM.
In the A1200/4000/CD32 (dunno about earlier machines) CBM left 512kb for the 2nd half of a 1mb ROM at $E00000-$E7FFFF, with the normal 512kb at $f80000-$ffffff as the 1st half...I guess any future upgrades wouldn't have fitted a 512k ROM, as someone else said the A1200 40.68 is already a tight fit
 
 The only trouble is that it's not a contiguous 1mb area, so you'll need to build it as 2 separate 512k images (1 at $e00000 the other at $f80000) and then join them together to make the single 1mb ROM :hammer:

[motorollin]

Would this work? Is there any way to get it to use all 1MB of the ROMs?

--
moto

[Doobrey]

motorollin wrote:
@Doobrey
Are there any other libraries I can safely leave out? I'll be using my Blizzard SCSI interface, so can I remove scsi.device? Also, I don't use the PCMCIA slot. Can I remove the card device and resource?

In the remus.guide there's a list of what libraries/devices etc depend on each other, there isn't really that much else that can safely be removed.
 Removing scsi.device,card.resource and carddisk.resource works fine on UAE, but I haven't tried it on my A1200 cos I need them for the HD and network card.
 I've also booted fine without the v40 icon.library, leaving the v45 one in libs: , but again others who tried it couldn't boot ! ..ahh, the joys of no 2 Amiga setups being the same :lol:

[motorollin]

I think I'll set up UAE and see what I can remove. How did you get your KickFlash device to work with 1MB?

--
moto

[_yak_]

I don't know how is the ROM build up but I presume it is some kind of a list of modules, right? And since the ROM is always at the same address, the modules probably contain direct pointers to successors/predecessors. If all this is true, it should be easy to write a program to divide the ROM into two 512KB parts. It would be cool to have whole another 512KB for additional modules . Does someone there actualy know how the ROM modules are linked together?

[Doobrey]

motorollin wrote:
I think I'll set up UAE and see what I can remove. How did you get your KickFlash device to work with 1MB?

If you're running UAE with host directories mounted as amiga drives, use $e00000 as the base address when building an extended ROM as UAE uses a filesystem thats hardcoded into the $f0000 space..plus it clashes with a 'magic window' for the Amiga side to communicate with UAE.
Also use the CD32 version of exec44/45 in the 'normal' rom ,as the other versions don't search for extended roms in the $e00000 space.
If the extended rom doesn't contain exec, you need to put the example romheader (in remus/others/romheader) as the first item in the build list to get the normal rom booting first.

I guess all this stuff should get added to the docs, at least I'm honest and admit they're crap :-D

As for the kickflash, I did it similar to the way RedSkull did it in his kf500, except I've mapped the $f8 part to the lower half and the $e0 part to the upper half  because I want to use the flash's 32kb(16kb in each chip) parameter block as non-volatile memory  :sealed:

[motorollin]

IOW, if I want to use 1MB of kickstart, I have to build a KickFlash device :roll: I'm trying to experiment with UAE but for some reason it won't boot with a 40.68 image from my A1200. Grrrrrr....

--
moto