Graphical slowdowns on my new A4000

[voyager]

Hey guy’s
I got myself a birthday present, a Amiga 4000.
The only thing its sold as defective, one of the audio channels has give up the ghost.
So I thought probably the audio cap’s and ordered a set cap’s from Cosmos.

Received my A4000 and after inspection the cpu board was missing. It was sold as defective amiga not as one with a missing cpu board so I got back to the seller offering him to send it back. He offered me so send a 030 cpu board and he did. After some playing with the jumpers it booted up!

After that I took her apart and recapped the main and daughterboard. On the audio section of the board someone already tried to repair it something I did not hoped to see. The decoupling caps of the audio section were already replaced by 2 small (tentaal) cap’s 2,2 UF 35v. Normally we see 22 UF there. The rest of the caps were in really terrible condition and were leaking. Its hard the get them off without damaging the main board. It’s not the first board I did so after a few hours the board was clean and I had new caps. Well almost I think Cosmos forget to pack the 2 22UF for the audio so I used 2, 10 UF non suffice mounded caps and soldered them on high so I can still see the tracks under them as a temperedly solution.

Time to start her up.. and yes she still works, AND I have 2 channel audio success!...

So the next step would be to install a hard disk and setup the os.

I used winuae, usb to ide convertor and 2 40 gig hard disks. This is my first installation on a real hard disk normally I use CF but hey it’s a big box amiga so why not.

I use HDINSTTools because if gives me the right data and its recognized as a 39 gig disk.
Setup the drive with SFS and used a a maxtransfer setting of 0x1fe00.
But is this right? I always thought that this maxtransfer setting was only for CF card and not for real Hard disks.

Mask is set at 0x7ffffffe block size 512, the boot partition is 955648 KB using DOStype SFS\0

Did a sfsformat on DH0: and all seems fine. Installed classic WB 3.5 by copying DH1: tot DH0:

In the emulator all is fine, moved the disk to my real A4000 and it boots just like I expected.

Now for the strange part, I have graphical slowdowns, this means that I can see every line being drawn on the screen especially in directory opus. On opening it takes 5 minutes to display the screen.

The effect is getting more extreme when I connect a cdrom as slave.
I have done this on 2 drives both act the same. Both drives are set as master.

This sounds ridicules probably but I looks like the chipram bus is choking and that data from the harddisk is transfer to chipram overloading the chipram bandwidth.

Or the cpu is extremely busy getting data of the harddisk, meaning something is very wrong with the setup of the drive.

So what’s going on here?

[source]

How much memory is there. If everything ide buffers drive access is runing through chip ram that wouls slow down.

[Galahad/FLT]

Make sure you have the correct jumper settings on the mainboard for ram.

[voyager]

I have 16 MB fast 2 mb chip on the mainboard. It's more like a complete standstill if I redraw a compleet screen like dopus.

[davideo]

What resolution screen are you running your WB in and how many colours?

Dave G

[voyager]

Standard classic workbench Hires @ 256 colors, its never a problem for my a1200 with the same spec's

[davideo]

How much free Chip and Fast RAM do you have once it has booted to WB?

Dave G

[voyager]

1,713,288 chip 14,060,632 fast

Fussy you tube phone movie :

[ Show youtube player ]

[davideo]

The speed of your WB looks fine and I'm sure my 4000 with its original 030 operated at a similair speed.

The problem appears to be with Dopus.

I know Dopus opens its own screen - perhaps that is where the problem lies.

Dave G

[voyager]

No it happens to normal screen redraw also not only dopus, but it seems random.
I have tried to replace the hard disk with a different one, replaced the file system, used hdtoolbox instead of hdinsttools. Used a real IDE controller instead of a usb to IDE solution to no avail.

Will try a classic workbench advanced installation.

edit: Classic Workbench ADVSP works normal, so it seems to be a software thing...

[thgill]

Originally Posted by voyager

edit: Classic Workbench ADVSP works normal, so it seems to be a software thing...

Sounds like you had some software eating up cpu time. I have seen that on my A1200 whenever something is hammering the cpu/bus.

[Toni Wilen]

Perhaps some device generating huge amount of hardware interrupts. It can cause similar slowdown.

[voyager]

A clean os 3.5 install works also fine, needs some more testing but it looks good, I think its the classic wb pack. I want to know what it is. I keep testing diferent setups

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by voyager

A clean os 3.5 install works also fine, needs some more testing but it looks good, I think its the classic wb pack. I want to know what it is. I keep testing diferent setups

Disable CyberBugfix and see if that helps

[voyager]

Gave her a good tryout yesterday and she liked it.. that did not came out right..
Anyhow you mister fitzsteve you are a genius. Its seems the problem is gone and the response is good Jeeehhh

But before I fill here up, I have another small problem with check 4< GB. Computer says no….

I used a scsi.device from the 128GB support folder scsi_ide_43_24 Patched. And copied it to devs, renamed scsi.device. Already using SFS, so why still no Joy?

On my 1200 I use the cosmos scsi.device and sfs and that’s a go.. The 4000 is really a different machine.

[voyager]

so nobody knows why I can not break the 4 gig limit?

[ancalimon]

Are you using a patched scsi.device for A1200?

Also did you replace the new scsi.device with the one in the ROM using something like blizkick or loadmodule from aminet and reboot to have the new one become active?

[voyager]

Yes I use a patched scsi.device for a a4000 not a 1200 version
In classic workbench you just copy a scsi.device in de devs directory and classic workbench then uses a loadmodule I think. It works on my A1200.
However the scsi.device I select is 43.24, but "version scsi.device" is giving me 43.35 so I don’t think it getting loaded. The startup-sequence of classic workbench is a bit over my head for me.
I think I have to ask this again in the classic WB section of the board.

[8bitbubsy]

In s:startup-sequence after the SetPatch line, put the following line:
C:LoadModule DEVS:scsi.device (given DH0 is your system disk)


So it looks for example like this:
C:SetPatch QUIET
C:LoadModule DEVS:scsi.device
[...]

EDIT:
proptip of the day: Don't use any of cosmos' "optimized" libs... He just optimizes, and he does not know that they have several compatibility serrors.

[voyager]

Its not that clear were to put it. I placed it after the line:

;End os3.5 checks

I get a : loading scsi.device failed : opject already exists
Scsi.device version 43 already resident




;ClassicWB Startup-Sequence
;--------------------------
;OS35

;Start OS3.5 Checks
IF EXISTS C:SquirrelSCSI
C:SquirrelSCSI
EndIF
Set SCSIUpdate 1
IF EXISTS C:IDEFix
C:IDEFix
Set SCSIUpdate 0
EndIF
IF EXISTS SYS:Expansion/XSurfIDE
Set SCSIUpdate 0
EndIF
IF EXISTS SYS:Prefs/Env-Archive/NOSCSIUPDATE
Set SCSIUpdate 0
EndIf
IF $SCSIUpdate EQ 1
C:SetPatch QUIET
ELSE
C:SetPatch SKIPROMUPDATES "scsi.device" QUIET
EndIF
Unset SCSIUpdate
;End OS3.5 Checks