ACA1221 woe

Hi all. I have just unlocked my ACA1221 accelerator and all seems fine until I set the overclock with ACAClock in my startup-sequence.

The fast ram is showing up as 63Mb however if I set ACAClock to S 2 or S 3 Workbench tells me upon boot that "Intuition is attempting to reset the workbench screen" If I click 'Retry' nothing happens; if I click 'Cancel' Workbench will boot but the screen is practically black and white. However sysinfo does show that the card is running at 21 or 28MHz.

Does anybody know what could be causing this?

I haven't applied the timing fix yet but do not understand why this would cause this particular error to arise on boot.

Any help would be appreciated on this matter.

I have physical 3.1 KS Roms installed into my A1200.

Thanks in advance to anybody who can help.

[Superman]

I don't use ACAclock in my startup. I do have the line "ACAcontrol s 3 >NIL:" though which applies the 28mhz speed fine.

That did the trick!

Thank you Superman for your mega fast response.

[Superman]

Glad it worked!

Now enjoy

[huepper]

Quicker is the manual.
The recommended commandline is:

acaclock s=3 q

Thanks for the input huepper but as I stated in the second sentence of my original post the manual's instructions were causing my Workbench to crash on boot whereas Superman's way works perfectly.

Thanks also for the help and swift response.

[intric8]

Curious - I've got the same code on my ACA1221 and everything is fine, EXCEPT for one thing: my Maprom is disabled.

I've got the "around the world" license installed and have unlocked the card's RAM to 64MB. I've also decided to overclock my CPU to 21MHz (from what I've read, the speed diff between 21 and 28 isn't that noticeable, but 28 can sometimes get a little warm). But the instructions on how to use the 1MB of Maprom are obtuse to say the least.

I have no idea how to point to my kickstart "file" (I thought it was a chip!). Out of curiosity and, frankly, exasperation, I tried using Superman's path above in my own startup sequence to unlock the maprom, but it didn't seem to do anything. If I go look in my Devs drawer I don't have anything related to Kickstarts, so it isn't much of a surprise.

This is what I see when I check the various status, though:


Sorry if this is a dunce question. Appreciate any help anyone might have. My ego is mostly intact, though, as quite a few folks seem to have struggled a bit with getting the most out of these cards right out of the box.

[SkulleateR]

Read out your Kickstart "chip", store it as KICK40068.A1200 in devs/kickstarts/ and then you got a file to use for your maprom feature

[Superman]

You should have had 3 codes sent for the full unlock. I trust that you did and you activated all 3 codes?

To use your on board kickstart as a maprom function you will need to use "ACAtune -maprom ** >NIL:" I think. Mine is different because I am pointing to a kickstart 3.1 file in my devs directory instead of using my onboard 3.0 kickstart.

Here is what I was using originally to maprom my on board kickstart 3.0

[intric8]

Ahhhh @Superman that very well might be it! I was confused, and I was reading the directions literally and they said something like, C:ACATune -maprom <kickfile> * or ** -cache on -burst on >NIL: and I was like, Kickfile? I'll try your line tonight and post back. THANKS! Your images are super helpful.

[Superman]

Haha yes the instructions pretty much give you every single parameter option available. You will only need to use one or two of them.

[intric8]

@Superman - You. Are. The. MAN.

Thanks very much for your helpful tips. My Maprom is enabled now, thanks to you.

Cheers - and have a great weekend.

OK now I have a new issue which I suspect IS related to the timing fix.

Since unlocking the accelerator card my WHDLoad games hang on boot. Everything else appears to be working fine just not the games. Everything was working flawlessly before the 28MHz unlock.

I removed the overclock line from my startup-sequence but the problem persists.

I will need to dismantle my Amiga completely (I assume) to get the motherboard revision and therefore the correct timing fix. Or is there a universal fix?

Thanks again for any help.

[intric8]

@the_poon, wow - that's intense. The only thing I've seen since using this fix (which has been great for me) has been after the WB loads, I have to click the screen somewhere to see my chipram and fastram stats at the top of the screen. Before, they would load up there without me doing anything. But according to Sysinfo 4, everything is fine so its just a UI glitch I guess.

To be clear, I'm not currently running WHDLoad on my machine right now, so I can't compare experiences entirely.

[Daedalus]

If WHDLoad issues are still there even with the card running at 17MHz, but they were working before, it doesn't sound like a timing fix. Has anything else changed? Something taking up more RAM perhaps?

Anyway, to do the timing fixes you need to remove the motherboard completely as the parts you need to remove are on the back of the motherboard. You can get the revision by just removing the top cover however, it'll be printed near the accelerator card connector.

[Superman]

I would try removing the card and re inserting it just to make sure its seated properly and hasn't shifted.

Thanks again guys. I will try all of this when I return from work later.

OK.


I just removed the 8Gb CF card with PFS3 All-In-One on it and replaced it with a 4Gb CF card that I set up with FFS.

It works perfectly!

I'm only confused because the 8Gb card worked without fail up until the point I unlocked the accelerator. I will try a new install on the 8Gb CF card this weekend and see if the problem replicates itself.

Thanks to everybody for their suggestions, guidance and patience.