New - Amiga Romulator for A500 - A600

[mkstr]

Originally Posted by patracy

Has anyone gotten the romulator to work with a GVP 030 accelerator? I only get a blue screen when I try to select a rom. I've removed J9 on the GVP card to get it to at least give me the romulator selection screen.

I think it would be worth seeing if you can load a ROM successfully from the serial console (bypass the menu). I can do a video to show how to wire this up, but it's unlikely to be particularly soon due to lockdown chaos! Maybe kipper2k can take some pictures or something in the meantime. You will need a 3.3V USB to serial interface cable to wire up to it.

Mike

[patracy]

I believe I have one of the serial interfaces laying around somewhere. How exactly does that work?

[patracy]

Originally Posted by cdh

The Romulator in my Amiga works fine with the TF534 installed in the CPU Slot.

Anyone know if the romulator works with a TF536?

[mkstr]

Originally Posted by patracy

I believe I have one of the serial interfaces laying around somewhere. How exactly does that work?

There are three pads on the Romulator that you can hook the serial cable up to with Dupont wires or whatever. The pads are marked TX and RX, and the one in the middle is ground. The serial cable should ideally be 3.3V, but the STM32 is 5V tolerant so a 5V one should be fine also. Connect the Romulator's TX pin to the RX pin on your serial cable and vice-versa.

Use terminal software like Putty (Windows) and open the COM port corresponding with the serial adapter. The port settings should be 115200, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, no handshaking. Once you have that open, and with the Amiga running, hit return a couple of times in the Putty window and you should see a prompt "CLI>". From here you can type "help" to see the supported commands. There are a few that may be useful:

ls - Lists the SD card contents.
load <filename> - Loads the specified ROM image into the SRAM and executes.
halt - Holds the Amiga in reset. This will be useful to see if the reset to an accelerator card is staying in reset or if the card is carrying on running.
run - Lets the Amiga go again.

If you use the "load" command you should be able to load a ROM image up and execute it as though you'd chosen it from the menu. If this works but the menu does not then the problem is a software compatibility issue within the menu.

Assuming we can get to the bottom of this I can publish a firmware update that you can load onto the Romulator over USB. You will need to cut up a USB cable for this and connect it to some different pads (but you don't need a special programmer).

Mike

(I can do a walkthrough video if necessary, assuming I can get some quiet to record one!)

[patracy]

I found my USB to serial adapter. I'll give this a try tonight. Just to clarify, I'm able to get the romulator to "boot" into it's load screen to select the rom. It's just when I select a rom from it, the screen just remains blue. I did have to pull jumper J9 on the GVP card to get the romulator to at least get to the select screen with the GVP installed.

[Ledfoot]

Originally Posted by mkstr

There are three pads on the Romulator that you can hook the serial cable up to with Dupont wires or whatever. The pads are marked TX and RX, and the one in the middle is ground. The serial cable should ideally be 3.3V, but the STM32 is 5V tolerant so a 5V one should be fine also. Connect the Romulator's TX pin to the RX pin on your serial cable and vice-versa.

Use terminal software like Putty (Windows) and open the COM port corresponding with the serial adapter. The port settings should be 115200, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, no handshaking. Once you have that open, and with the Amiga running, hit return a couple of times in the Putty window and you should see a prompt "CLI>". From here you can type "help" to see the supported commands. There are a few that may be useful:

ls - Lists the SD card contents.
load <filename> - Loads the specified ROM image into the SRAM and executes.
halt - Holds the Amiga in reset. This will be useful to see if the reset to an accelerator card is staying in reset or if the card is carrying on running.
run - Lets the Amiga go again.

If you use the "load" command you should be able to load a ROM image up and execute it as though you'd chosen it from the menu. If this works but the menu does not then the problem is a software compatibility issue within the menu.

Assuming we can get to the bottom of this I can publish a firmware update that you can load onto the Romulator over USB. You will need to cut up a USB cable for this and connect it to some different pads (but you don't need a special programmer).

Mike

(I can do a walkthrough video if necessary, assuming I can get some quiet to record one!)

As soon as my v7 ROMs for my A2620 arrive I can give this a try.. fingers crossed for this coming weekend... Will let you know what I find.

[patracy]

Well, I left the serial adapter on my desk, so I can't test it tonight.

[mkstr]

Originally Posted by Ledfoot

As soon as my v7 ROMs for my A2620 arrive I can give this a try.. fingers crossed for this coming weekend... Will let you know what I find.

The "halt" command will hold the motherboard reset continuously, so this might enable you to use your simple oscilloscope to check if the 2620 reset is also being held.

[Ledfoot]

Originally Posted by mkstr

The "halt" command will hold the motherboard reset continuously, so this might enable you to use your simple oscilloscope to check if the 2620 reset is also being held.

Ok, well, fingers crossed I'll get the ROMs in the mail by this weekend. So just let me know what you want me to do - Romulator in/out, A2620 in/out, what pins to probe, etc.

As I said I also have a usb-serial adapter so I can grab the romulator's console if that helps as well..

[patracy]

Well I realize tonight I brought home the wrong dayton jumpers too. I remembered there being pins on the romulator, but those are the USB connection. (I believe that's to access the SD card) I did however find that J2 on the GVP card disables the 030. For the heck of it, I jumpered it and wanted to see if I got anywhere past the selection screen. That did allow me to run all the roms I have loaded then with the GVP at least slotted in without locking on the blue screen. So it's certainly something to do with reset. Could the romulator's rst signal tap be moved to somewhere on the GVP card to resolve this instead?

[mkstr]

Originally Posted by patracy

Well I realize tonight I brought home the wrong dayton jumpers too. I remembered there being pins on the romulator, but those are the USB connection. (I believe that's to access the SD card) I did however find that J2 on the GVP card disables the 030. For the heck of it, I jumpered it and wanted to see if I got anywhere past the selection screen. That did allow me to run all the roms I have loaded then with the GVP at least slotted in without locking on the blue screen. So it's certainly something to do with reset. Could the romulator's rst signal tap be moved to somewhere on the GVP card to resolve this instead?

Actually it could still be a problem with the menu software not working properly on the 030 - loading a ROM from the serial console will rule that out. Yes, connecting the RESET up elsewhere is one potential solution.

When you say it locks on the blue screen, is it solid blue or the copper gradient blue? If the latter then I think it's highly likely to be a problem with the menu, because the copperlist setup is pretty much the only thing that happens before interrupts get enabled.

Mike

[patracy]

Here's a quick video of trying to kick off diagrom with the gvp 030 enabled. Just a solid blue screen.

[ Show youtube player ]

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

[patracy]

I was able to test some tonight. I opened a telnet session and tried loading the roms from that. Still behaves the same as in the video above. The romulator seems to still be running and responsive to the telnet session. But everything is lost with the amiga and the reset signal. I can specify for it to reboot and the romulator will echo a few lines, but the system never recovers from that blue screen. Here's what is echoed back when I try to run the rom from telnet.

CLI> load 16bit.bin
1388534423.000 main.c(253): Image is <= 512K
1388534423.000 main.c(274): Image is a byte-swapped Amiga ROM
1388534423.000 usb.c(176): Switching to USB device mode
1388534424.000 main.c(314): Read 524288 bytes
CLI>

[patracy]

Oh and in the blue screen state, ctrl+amiga+amiga have no response as well.

[patracy]

Well, I had advice from a group on facebook to try to move the rst signal from the romulator to the GVP card. That has me working now!

[cdh]

Super! I'm glad you were able to get your GVP card working with the Romulator!

[patracy]

So I spoke a little too soon perhaps. While I'm able to boot now by moving the romulator's reset signal tap to the GVP card. It's not 100%. It sometimes still hangs at the blue screen shown before. I suppose it's just going to be nature of the beast.

[Ledfoot]

Is it only happening after you switch ROMs or only after a cold boot? Wondering if it's a timing thing (like on a cold boot or when changing roms it takes the romulator a bit longer and the GVP beats it to the punch...)

[Ledfoot]

Anybody have a clue where I might try to tie into the reset on an A2620 like patracy did on his GVP card?

[seb132]

Are these wonders available as open source projects ?
Or only sold by AOTL ?
Would be good to have another partner in Europe and/or in Australia because shipping costs from US to overseas became ridiculous during Trump...
Last question, will we see Romulators for 32 bits Amiga ?