Furia MAPROM / SHADOWROM issues

[thgill]

Just a follow up: I flashed the Furia back to firmware 12.5 and haven’t had anymore issues.

[amigasith]

Originally Posted by thgill

Just a follow up: I flashed the Furia back to firmware 12.5 and haven’t had anymore issues.

That's strange. Version 12.5 ran okay-ish on my A600, 12.7 was a total mess from a stability point of view, and 12.8 is the most stable so far.

I suspect that at the end of the day, most if not all of the issues that we see are somewhat related to timings and that different combinations of PSU / state of the mainboard / Furia revision / CF or SD card all have their own timing combinations that may or may not work

The scsi.device version being used also makes a huge difference, at least in the tests that I did. That again points to timings, since every version of scsi.device "hammers" a bit different at the devices connected. For me, the stock scsi.device that comes with Kickstart 3.1 works best.

[amigasith]

As Boris pointed out in another Furia thread here on EAB, a new Firmware version was released:

Originally Posted by Boboo_SK

Firmware v13.0 fo Furia EC020 Rev2.x and Rev3.0, update and fix.
Download

- Kickstart 3.1.4 and SD-Card/CF, Cache friendly
- Optimize DRAM, CAS access (two type memory)

I tested all afternoon with the new version and I only got a red screen of death once when I was using the IDE speed up option. Without the IDE speed up, I haven't seen a red screen or any other lock-up yet. Crossing fingers

Update: I knew why I didn't declare success early Today, after running successfully for around 2 hours with my LHA loop into RAM:, the red screen of death appeared after the 11th Ctrl-A-A reset. So in summary - at least for me - V13.0 didn't really change anything. All in all, it behaves like V12.8 in my experiment.

[suppah]

Aaaand.. Here I am too. Maybe a tad off topic, sorry, but this looks like the freshest Furia related thread on EAB.

Im an (I would like to say happy) owner of a red Furia board, and im having issues with it. Actually I saw this A600 with Furia, 604n, 2MB chip, recapped, KS 3.1 rom, some floppies and other niceties on eBay for a very very good price (at least 50% of what I would have asked) so I didn't even think about it and bought the puppy. It came with a CF with WB 3.1 installed, clean (this now makes me wonder if the guy selling me it was aware his A600 was unstable). Formatted the CF card and divided the "hard disk" in the classic DH0 and DH1 manner, all PFS, "System314" and "Work". At the beginning, no troubles, everything seemed to be working fine, a nice maprommed 3.1.4 A600 setup. As soon I started copying MANY files ie. WHDLoad, after some minutes I would get all sorts of errors.. PFS related errors, then "DH1 process has crashed" errors and so on. I was unable to copy WHDLoad. There was no way to do it (I usually prepare CF cards with WinUAE or FS-UAE and put them in the real miggys but this time I wanted to test the machine). A friend of mine, which has his share of troubles as well with Furia, suggested me to buy an SD card with an SD adapter instead. So I bought the same setup he has, which he says at least fixed the ide related problems. Rastport 47B, SD adapter and Sandisk SD. After waiting weeks because of the damned Corona virus I received the adapter and the card, mounted it instead of the CF adapter with short cable. Began the test again, copying WHDLoad, zillion of files. Hours and hours later zero IDE related problems whatsoever, I was very happy. Began also to do some benchmarks and loved the card, when it works it's quite a best for a 68020 (EC). One thing I noticed is that the card gets very hot. Anyway, I was playing Super Stardust on my A1200 so I wasn't really playing much on the A600 until I finished SS and began playing Stardust "OCS", which I never did when I was a kid because I didn't know it even existed. Played Stardust for hours / days, everything fine. I was quite happy. I did already read all Furia related threads here because of the troubles my friend had (3.1.4 in ROM = no boot with cache enabled, and so on) so I thought to be a lucky Furia owner. After Stardust (still have to finish it), began playing other games too and now im in hell again.

So my Furia issues seem to be related to CPU intensive games. So far these games work on my setup flawlessly:

- Stardust
- Zool

And those bomb out (note some may not seem CPU intensive but you never know):

- Frontier (the quickest to crash, CPU intensive)
- Alien Breed
- GhostsNGoblins


IDE speedup for me *never* works. If I enable it I have some seconds of IDE use before it crashes badly and it doesn't seem to give any speed up, at least when tried with Sysinfo's test.

When the system crashes sometimes it crashes so bad that afterwards the only solution I have is to power the Amiga off for some seconds. Errors encountered are: corrupted exec memory lists (after WHDLoad use), Recoverable alert (don't remember the code) in the next boot after a bad crash, totally scary crash where after the reboot the system doesn't even see the SD "hard disk" anymore and displays the Kickstart wanting disk screen (first time I had it I thought the Amiga broke up).

Tried hours of memory test no problems too..

Im trying to understand why this happens. My normal setup is loading KS 3.1.4 with Maprom but I also tried booting without startup sequence with no maprom active (so KS 3.1), launching OS 3.9 SetPatch and immediately after loading WHDLoad games that crash. Same, no changes at all. Im not sure yet which Furia firmware I have I'll try to be active in this thread to see if I can find a solution to my woes.

[Jolabandola]

Strange. It almost seems like every Furia is behaving differently. I have been looking at somehow flashing my Furia with the latest firmware but now i am not so sure anymore.
My system is very stable and i have never even had a crash. i play on it almost every day now that it is finally finished. I even got a pcmcia cardreader for it too.
Like i said earler, the only issue i have with mine is starting it up. Its the same procedure every time. Flip switch, early bootmenu, disable cpu cache, click boot. It goes as far in the startup-sequence as to setpach then it resets by itself. Again early bootmenu, disable cache and this time it starts and just stays on forever.

I never got Maprom to work but Shadowrom and ide-speedup works perfectly. Im using a 3.1.4 kickstart rom and OS3.1.4.1 and the latest BestWB.
It gets hot indeed and i think my next purchase will be the active cooling for it.

[psoma]

I had reported problems earlier of both my Furias randomly only booting to 4.5MB despite a recap. Turns out... the C613 cap still wasn't great so I re-re-capped both C613s and now both Furias boot consistently to 9MB.

Lesson learned. Don't assume a recap addresses all cap issues.

[suppah]

Haven't had much time to test my A600 but I confirm it crashes with high cpu load. Fails after some minutes (like with Frointer) by doing an LHA test in RAM. The A600 is recapped but im not sure it's a good job so maybe I'll try to recap it again by a professionist.

[nikosidis]

I just got my Furia yesterday. It is the blue, rev. 3 card. I have a DOM disk and my A600 is recapped. From Sys speed I got 6529 Drystones. Ran Elite for 30 mins. and all other stuff I tried are rock steady. OS is 3.1 and Rom is 3.1. I have the card without fan.
I was afraid the card was not compatible with some demos stuff but it is. I only had to turn off FPU to run EON. For some other demo stuff I have to boot with 1.3 but I have a rom switch so that is no problem, that is not related to Furia anyway. What a cheap and great card. Color me impressed and ultra happy

[nikosidis]

With Shadowrom I got 6682 Drystones. 2,172,464 Speed in Bytes/Sec with IDESpeedup off and 2,528,720 with IDE Speed on. That is faster than my Blizzard 030 IV regarding disk speed!! I unpacked a a hell of a lot .lha files and not a single problem. PFS3

[Jolabandola]

Today i recieved the package with my Furia back from Poland. I sent it off to Lotharek for firmware upgrade and now it works like a dream. No more disable cpu cache and messing around to get it to work.