English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Furia Woes/Counterfeit Chips [Resolved tnx to Lotharek and Boris]

project23 · 27 July 2018, 18:54

Hi all

[For the following, please substitute all instances of the word 'byte' with 'nibble' or 4 bits - my bad!]

This is my first post here, so before i begin, hello to all. Nice community here, i've lurked for some time, lol.

Anyway! I recently purchased a Furia from amigastore.eu and i've been having some problems with stability. I have no doubt that right now a dozen users in unison are shouting 'it's not seated properly!' or 'ground the damn thing!' - and while your suggestions are totally appropriate, I should say that i have tried *everything* I can find even the vaguest reference to online. Before i describe the problem in detail i'll just give a short list:

So far I have:

Recapped the A600 - no change
Cleaned/scraped (with a blade) the pins - no change
Grounded with 1.5mm^2 cable to multiple points - no change
Resoldered the 68k on the mainboard - no change
Power supply - I've ran 3 different Amiga PSU's including the A500 linear, as well as an ATX supply with an appropriate dummy load - slight change (the 600 supply as well as another made the situation a bit worse, but i think thats just a bad supply).
Ram-wait jumper on/off - no change (except speed of course)
CF/HD - This happens from HD or floppy, but i'm running an SD to IDE.
Interference - I was worried about a nasty ringing from my cheap scart to hdmi converted (beware of this!), but removing it has no effect. I've ran this thing on multiple monitors/tv's, and have even taken the A600 around the house on the off chance that its some local interference problem - no change.

I've looked at the 7mhz and the 33mhz clocks on the scope and they seem fine. I've a 100mhz scope so if anyone has any other ideas of things to check then let me know! The 5v/12v rails are both pretty flat - we're talking tens of mV if any visible ripple.

Okay! So the problem is simply that the system crashes (usually to a guru) after anywhere from a couple of minutes to a whole hour of use. This happens in games, it happens in workbench. It happens when in heavy use (such as the Frontier intro) at best after about 20 minutes, at worst after about a minute. It happens with no use at all (left idle on the workbench desktop) after at best about an hour?

The guru is usually an illegal operation, or illegal address, and the address is always in the Z2 space (which makes sense, as the fastram is always active).

What is *really* interesting, is that when running MBRTest2, if the system doesn't crash beforehand, I do actually get test failures on the 8mb Z2 fastram range. This does not happen on the 1.5meg upper range used for maprom etc, nor does it happen with the CHIPRAM.

When it *does* fail, it seems to fail on the MARCH/MSCAN test (though i'm still trying to get more data on this) - but what is really curious is that it *always* fails on the 1st, 3rd, or 6th byte of the 8byte test word.

For example: a write of AAAAAAAA might return a 3A3AA3AA on read. Sometimes it's just the first byte thats incorrect, sometimes it's all three, but it is *never* any of the other five bytes. I've (as of today) started making a list of the address lines that MBRTest reports, and so far it is always four or more of:

8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31

Most of the time it is about half of these, but occasionally it's all of them. I'm not *certain* of the applicability of this data to the Furia specifically, but i'm guessing this relates to only the 1st, 3rd, or 6th byte of the test words failing.

Sometimes the scan runs repeatedly for around 5 or 10 minutes without an error - but it will always either crash first, or given an error in the 8meg fastram range only.

I'm at my wits end with this! haha... i've emailed amigastore.eu about a week ago but so far received no reply. I emailed them again today in the hopes that they'll get back to me.

Obviously i'm not certain that the furia is at fault, so i'm open to any and all suggestions! That being said, with the pattern of failures in MBR2 i'm starting to lean towards something being wrong with the furia?

I'd appreciate *any* help whatsoever!

Many thanks all!

John

27 July 2018, 18:54	#1
project23 Used Register Join Date: Jul 2018 Location: Liverpool Age: 41 Posts: 437	Furia Woes/Counterfeit Chips [Resolved tnx to Lotharek and Boris] Hi all [For the following, please substitute all instances of the word 'byte' with 'nibble' or 4 bits - my bad!] This is my first post here, so before i begin, hello to all. Nice community here, i've lurked for some time, lol. Anyway! I recently purchased a Furia from amigastore.eu and i've been having some problems with stability. I have no doubt that right now a dozen users in unison are shouting 'it's not seated properly!' or 'ground the damn thing!' - and while your suggestions are totally appropriate, I should say that i have tried everything I can find even the vaguest reference to online. Before i describe the problem in detail i'll just give a short list: So far I have: Recapped the A600 - no change Cleaned/scraped (with a blade) the pins - no change Grounded with 1.5mm^2 cable to multiple points - no change Resoldered the 68k on the mainboard - no change Power supply - I've ran 3 different Amiga PSU's including the A500 linear, as well as an ATX supply with an appropriate dummy load - slight change (the 600 supply as well as another made the situation a bit worse, but i think thats just a bad supply). Ram-wait jumper on/off - no change (except speed of course) CF/HD - This happens from HD or floppy, but i'm running an SD to IDE. Interference - I was worried about a nasty ringing from my cheap scart to hdmi converted (beware of this!), but removing it has no effect. I've ran this thing on multiple monitors/tv's, and have even taken the A600 around the house on the off chance that its some local interference problem - no change. I've looked at the 7mhz and the 33mhz clocks on the scope and they seem fine. I've a 100mhz scope so if anyone has any other ideas of things to check then let me know! The 5v/12v rails are both pretty flat - we're talking tens of mV if any visible ripple. Okay! So the problem is simply that the system crashes (usually to a guru) after anywhere from a couple of minutes to a whole hour of use. This happens in games, it happens in workbench. It happens when in heavy use (such as the Frontier intro) at best after about 20 minutes, at worst after about a minute. It happens with no use at all (left idle on the workbench desktop) after at best about an hour? The guru is usually an illegal operation, or illegal address, and the address is always in the Z2 space (which makes sense, as the fastram is always active). What is really interesting, is that when running MBRTest2, if the system doesn't crash beforehand, I do actually get test failures on the 8mb Z2 fastram range. This does not happen on the 1.5meg upper range used for maprom etc, nor does it happen with the CHIPRAM. When it does fail, it seems to fail on the MARCH/MSCAN test (though i'm still trying to get more data on this) - but what is really curious is that it always fails on the 1st, 3rd, or 6th byte of the 8byte test word. For example: a write of AAAAAAAA might return a 3A3AA3AA on read. Sometimes it's just the first byte thats incorrect, sometimes it's all three, but it is never any of the other five bytes. I've (as of today) started making a list of the address lines that MBRTest reports, and so far it is always four or more of: 8, 9, 10, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31 Most of the time it is about half of these, but occasionally it's all of them. I'm not certain of the applicability of this data to the Furia specifically, but i'm guessing this relates to only the 1st, 3rd, or 6th byte of the test words failing. Sometimes the scan runs repeatedly for around 5 or 10 minutes without an error - but it will always either crash first, or given an error in the 8meg fastram range only. I'm at my wits end with this! haha... i've emailed amigastore.eu about a week ago but so far received no reply. I emailed them again today in the hopes that they'll get back to me. Obviously i'm not certain that the furia is at fault, so i'm open to any and all suggestions! That being said, with the pattern of failures in MBR2 i'm starting to lean towards something being wrong with the furia? I'd appreciate any help whatsoever! Many thanks all! John Last edited by project23; 13 October 2018 at 18:30. Reason: Correcting byte/nibble