Furia Fun

[TreacleWench]

So I have recently acquired a Furia v2 from AmigaStore for my A600 and I thought I would share my experiences with it so far...

The Furia requires a lot of force to get it onto the CPU, I've had Indivisions and an ACA020 before and they required a lot of force too but no where near as much as is required to get the Furia on. I would recommend taking the motherboard out of the case to do it and place something underneath it so that you don't mark your table, I have an A2 cutting mat that I do all my work on which was perfect for this.

This has given me a lot of trouble and I have not been 100% successful so far. Before buying the Furia, I had a Kingston Elite Pro X133 4GB card which worked fine in the A600. The Furia speeds up the IDE interface and requires a fast CF card. I had read online already that Kingston cards were no good so I expected it to not work with the Furia installed and sure enough, it didn't. My Amiga would just display the Kickstart screen and not even attempt to boot the CF.

So I ordered a Sandisk Ultra 16GB 50mb/s card from Amazon for £16.99 and spent sometime setting it up in WINUAE with the PFS3_AIO file system and Classic Workbench ADVSP. This worked fine in the emulator but on plugging it into the Amiga, I kept getting Guru Meditation errors continuously on power on. I removed the Furia to test if this was the problem but then found that the CF card would just boot to a CLI prompt as if the card was empty.

Leaving the Furia disconnected for the time being I booted the Workbench 3.1 install disk to find that the CF HDD did not appear on the Workbench. I opened up HDTools and found that the drive was detected but showed up as unintialised. Very weird!

So I then decided to do a very bare bones test, I would re-setup the CF card with a basic Workbench 3.1 install on my real Amiga and see if it works with and without the Furia. Firstly on reading the drive information in HDTools I got the error "Unit is not a disk (Type 7)", however, it still read the drive info and allowed me to continue. I created a 500MB partition starting at cylinder 2 and used the default FFS. I know the file system choice and default scsi.device are not ideal for a 16GB card but it would be adequate for the purposes of this test. So I installed Workbench 3.1 which all went smoothly and rebooted successfully to Workbench. So far so good...

So then I plugged the Furia back in and switched on...black screen. So is my new CF card still too slow? Who knows! With the Furia still connected I booted the Workbench 3.1 floppy and to my surprise the CF HDD shows up on the Workbench! And I can open it and browse the drawers!! And it is incredibly fast!!! Workbench also reports 9.5MB of available Fast RAM which is good. Then I noticed something else, while browsing the drawers on the CF card, every time I opened the Tools drawer the screen would freeze halfway through loading the directory and I would have to reboot. The mouse cursor would still move but would be stuck as a clock and I would not be able to click on anything else.

So the Furia obviously does allow the CF to be used but not without errors. I wonder if the Amiga does start booting but hangs before anything can be displayed on screen? I might try and put something at the start of the startup-sequence to confirm this. As my Amiga case is open at the moment, I don't have the LEDs connected so can't see if there is any HDD activity, I will have to reconnect them. Also, maybe FFS has compatibility issues with the Furia's accelerated IDE? The next test will be to install Workbench again but with PFS3_AIO and a patched scsi.device to see what happens then. Will post updates after this!

[Superman]

I gave up on mine with CF as I also had the same issues with a Transcend 4gb 133x card and a Sandisk Ultra 8gb 50mb/s card. Once I switched to a cheap 8gb Sandisk SD card it worked perfectly first try.

[TreacleWench]

I think I read a post about that, it may have been from you! I have considered getting an IDE to SD adapter, I just can't stomach the fact I just wasted £17 on a useless CF card. I have already dropped over £250 just in accessories for this Amiga and it still doesn't work as intended. Plus I am not even finished yet!

At least the Amiga itself only cost me £30

[Superman]

I only paid £30 for mine also but it had audio issues due to cap leakage so I got it repaired and recapped and now it's fully working. I agree it is a bit annoying when you buy an expensive decent CF card and it won't work that is for sure. The SD card was about £8.99 I think and the SD adapter around £15 so actually cheaper than an equivalent CF.

[idrougge]

Did you use the correct maxtransfer value?

[Toryglen-boy]

i have 2 Furias, anyone who has them has teething troubles

use a GOOD CF card, and by that, i mean Sandisk only, and format the partitions with PFS3, trust me, you will be good to go.

[TreacleWench]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Did you use the correct maxtransfer value?

I used 0x1fe00, it works fine without the Furia.

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

i have 2 Furias, anyone who has them has teething troubles

use a GOOD CF card, and by that, i mean Sandisk only, and format the partitions with PFS3, trust me, you will be good to go.

Yeah, I have a good modern Sandisk card. Haven't got round to trying PFS3 yet but I will.

At least I finally got my Gotek working, I went through nine USB sticks/memory cards before I found one that worked and they were all Sandisk!

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by TreacleWench

I used 0x1fe00, it works fine without the Furia.



Yeah, I have a good modern Sandisk card. Haven't got round to trying PFS3 yet but I will.

At least I finally got my Gotek working, I went through nine USB sticks/memory cards before I found one that worked and they were all Sandisk!

i had all sorts of illeagal exception errors and system hanging, until i went to PSF3 ... been trouble free ever since. TBH, i find the Furia to be far more usable than the Vampire II


EDIT : You obviously know your onions, and what you're doing, give us a shout, if you need a hand

[TreacleWench]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

i had all sorts of illeagal exception errors and system hanging, until i went to PSF3 ... been trouble free ever since. TBH, i find the Furia to be far more usable than the Vampire II


EDIT : You obviously know your onions, and what you're doing, give us a shout, if you need a hand

Thanks I used to have an Amiga 600 with a HxC and ACA020, never had these troubles with either of them. At least the payoff is a cheaper floppy emulator and a much higher performing accelerator!

[Nibbler]

Some frustrating aspects are... well..

Lets try this and see what happends.

ftp://ftp.amigascne.org/pub/amiga/Gr...t-Overdose.dms

(dosent matter if Whdload or straight from floppy)

Something very odd will happen

Anyone along for this adventure ? for science

PS: Please dont remove the Furia from the Board, Ok ?

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by Nibbler

Some frustrating aspects are... well..

Lets try this and see what happends.

ftp://ftp.amigascne.org/pub/amiga/Gr...t-Overdose.dms

(dosent matter if Whdload or straight from floppy)

Something very odd will happen

Anyone along for this adventure ? for science

PS: Please dont remove the Furia from the Board, Ok ?

yeah, doesn't some of the demos etc need MMU ??

[Superman]

Originally Posted by Nibbler

Some frustrating aspects are... well..

Lets try this and see what happends.

ftp://ftp.amigascne.org/pub/amiga/Gr...t-Overdose.dms

(dosent matter if Whdload or straight from floppy)

Something very odd will happen

Anyone along for this adventure ? for science

PS: Please dont remove the Furia from the Board, Ok ?

Just tried it myself and it was going ok for about 5 mins. Then it suddenly went like someone has unplugged the scart from the tv and it's says " No scart signal" on the screen. Oh and CTRL A A to reset did not get rid of it. I had to switch off at the power supply. This was the whdload version for reference.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

yeah, doesn't some of the demos etc need MMU ??

MMU on AmigaOS is just for development/debugging purposes. No demos/games require an MMU, or at least it would be somewhat silly to do so.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

i have 2 Furias, anyone who has them has teething troubles

Except for me. But then again, I changed capacitors before mounting the card and used a tried and tested Sandisk card.

[Nibbler]

The Reason why OVERDOSE by DELIGHT Crash is caused my Memory access speed. ( I think so at least )

To Quote "The quick access to the memory makes this little card a real monster"

Yes, Memory speed is insane but can screw up the timing in the machine/software.
So, the Furias strengh is also her weakness.

[ Show youtube player ]

Its the Scene at 6:05 that causes the crash.
There is a request for memory there , it gets sucked out of the furia to fast .... ( but even with NoFastMem this will happen, very odd)
Booooooom Crash

[idrougge]

There is a waitstates jumper on the board, isn't there?

[Nibbler]

Originally Posted by Superman

Just tried it myself and it was going ok for about 5 mins. Then it suddenly went like someone has unplugged the scart from the tv and it's says " No scart signal" on the screen. Oh and CTRL A A to reset did not get rid of it. I had to switch off at the power supply. This was the whdload version for reference.

Yupp, thats exactly what happends. * dosent matter if Whdload or otherwise *

You need EXTREME luck that it survive the 6:05 mark. (mem accsess there)

Maybe the RAM WAIT JUMPER help ? (My A600 is closed,sorry)
Would be nice if somebody could test this ; when there A600 is open anyway

Greetings,Nibbler

[Nibbler]

Originally Posted by idrougge

There is a waitstates jumper on the board, isn't there?

Same thinking ( But you pressed Enter before me )

Looking forward to hear if the Ramwait Jumper helps

[Boboo_SK]

Originally Posted by Nibbler

Yupp, thats exactly what happends. * dosent matter if Whdload or otherwise *

You need EXTREME luck that it survive the 6:05 mark. (mem accsess there)

Maybe the RAM WAIT JUMPER help ? (My A600 is closed,sorry)
Would be nice if somebody could test this ; when there A600 is open anyway

Greetings,Nibbler

one trick:
Click Workbech, System and Click icon "NoFastMem"
CLI write "Furiatune Cache off" Enter
CLI "df0:" Enter
CLI "overdose" Enter

[Nibbler]

I know Boboo, but its still not 100% sure it will work.
But hints and workarounds are always welcome , so HUGE thanks, Boboo