Minimig Problem - Help!

[bon]

I just finished with the help of a friend of mine (who is really good in soldering) my minimig. I also bought a pre-programmed PIC from ebay and today started testing it.

I put kick.rom and minimig1.bin inside the SD card (2Gb Kingston Fat 16 Formatted) and plug the minimig on the monitor. The monitor shows it gets signal, blue and red leds light up on the minimig, and after a while the drive led (green) lights up too. I see however absolutely nothing on Screen. Pushing the "menu" button or F12, the minimig menu comes up, and it even lets me choose an .adf file from the SD card, reboot, everything! However it NEVER gets to the Amiga Kickstart Screen and of course loads no .adf file.... I have tried almost any ROM I could find with still no luck....

So any other Minimig owners/specialists out there I would really appreciate your help...

[HenryCase]

How are you obtaining your Kickstart ROM file?

[Andeda]

Sounds like the problem is with your kick.rom. I could send you mine from my minimig but that would be piracy

[bon]

I have some kickstart files I use with WinUAE, and tested them all....

[Andeda]

And you have named your kickfile kick.rom, have you?

[bon]

Of course I have renamed it to kick.rom .... I have also tried several different 1.3 ROMS...

Edit: Just for test reasons I used a working rom from another minimig so the problem is obviously NOT the Rom.... Ideas?

[freqmax]

Make a byte-by-byte copy of a working flashmemory. With same size.
Also check if the name is kick.rom or KICK.ROM
Hookup the RS232 for "console messages".

[bon]

@freqmax you got a pm

[markleman]

Firstly monitor the serial output from the PIC during boot and paste it here (use a serial terminal application at 115200baud 8N1 and the serial jumper on MCU IIRC).

Then check your soldering very carefully on the pins between the 68000 <-> xilinx and xilinx <-> RAM chips. It is possible for a minimig to partly function if there is a fault on these pins. Visually inspect, preferably under a microscope then use a Digital volt meter to look for shorts between adjacent pins and open circuit pins. If none of this shows up where the fault is then I would try an oscilloscope to inspect all these pins for activity, you would be looking for signals with clean high and low levels and not three levels (often a sign that a pin is shorted to the one next door).

I have just built 3 minimigs and my first one suffered from an almost invisible solder bridge between two of the higher address lines which stopped the boot code from successfully copying the kickstart image in to the RAM

Hope that helps, Regards Mark Leman

[bon]

First of all thank u for your answer Mark. Can u please tell me how can I "monitor the serial output from the PIC during boot" in windows Xp? Can u suggest a software to do this, cause I have not done such a thing before...

[denli]

You can connect to most RS232 setups with HyperTerminal (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490827.aspx) in Windows XP.
Also se Configuring HyperTerminal for BSPs (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa915983.aspx).

If you prefer PuTTY, that will also do (even works on Vista).
(http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)

[bon]

There u go... I have also sent this to Dennis...

=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~= PuTTY log 2008.01.13 17:15:10 =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=

Minimig Controller build 07-10-2007

by Dennis van Weeren
fatsize:240
fatno:2
fatstart:263
dirstart:743
direntrys:512
datastart:775
clustersize:64
MMC card found!
FPGA init is high
file found
FPGA bitstream file opened
***********************************************************
FPGA bitstream loaded
FPGA configured
loading kickstart
file found
...........................................................
kickstart loaded
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[bon]

Actual pics of it...

Picture 1 my minimig after having completed boot and picture 2 the only thing I can get to see onscreen...


Image 1

Image 2

[jensl]

Hey bon, have you tried an other sd/mmc card ?


cu
jens

[freqmax]

"We" should create a selftest bitstream.. (minimig1.bit)

It would be way more efficient that trying to measure things with dvm/oscilloscope.