PCMCIA support

[Blueberry]

Hi!

I am trying to transfer files between my Amiga 1200 and my laptop using an Amiga-formatted PCMCIA flash card. I have set the 'Chipset Extra' setting to A1200 and have 2MB chip and no fast. The emulated Amiga seems to recognize that it has a PCMCIA slot. I can run PrepCard and it does not complain that there is no card slot - it just says 'No card inserted'.

So this is as far as I got. How do I actually insert a card into the slot of the emulated Amiga? When I insert the card into my laptops PCMCIA slot, it is given a drive letter by Windows, and I can read the raw data from the card using the sector dump feature of Hex Workshop. But it does not show up as a card in the emulated Amiga.

If this feature is missing, is it something you would consider adding? I guess it would just be a matter of mapping the contents of the card at $600000 and then notifying the card handler that a card has been inserted. The CC0 automount should take care of the rest, right?

I tried mounting the sector dump as a hardfile, but this did not work, as the card uses the first sector for some meta information, and the boot block is on the second sector. I tried mounting just from the second sector as a hardfile, but this did not work either. It seems they disagreed about where the root block shoud be. Oh well...

Thanks...

-Aske

[alexh]

Just out of interest why are you trying to use an Amiga formatted card?

The normal technique is to format the card for use with Windows and use fat95 on the Amiga end.

Are you sure it's a FLASH card? I didnt think they worked with Amiga's (including emulated ones) out of the box and you needed the CFD driver installed.

[Blueberry]

I want it to be Amiga-formatted so I can use it in any Amiga without having to install fat95 first. And so that I can boot from it on the Amiga.

I am planning to replace my Amiga HD and need some way to bootstrap the machine. So a PCMCIA card to boot from really will be the most convenient approach. All my Amiga disks died in a basement flood.

I am not sure it is a flash card. It is a memory card of some sort, so I assumed it was some kind of flash. Maybe it isn't.

[alexh]

Ah, I see, you have an SRAM card. Can't be very big, 4Mbytes max.

[Blueberry]

Right. Thanks for the clarification.

[alexh]

Toni will know for sure, but I dont think WinUAE emulates PCMCIA. At least it didnt in May

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=29503

But reading what he put, maybe it is possible to map the PC's PCMCIA port to WinUAE's hard drive emulation?

Dunno about Amiga formatted cards. Perhaps if they appear in drive manager in windows.

[Toni Wilen]

PCMCIA is not emulated, yet.

PCMCIA (flash/sram devices only) should be easy to emulate, as long as Windows sees the card as a regular block device. (visible in device manager and in disk management)

I am not going to add any extra PMCIA Windows specific code. Emulated card will be mapped to hardfile or real harddrive (any block device visible to Windows)

PCMCIA NE2000 compatible card emulation probably happens someday too.. (using uaenet.device backend)

[Toni Wilen]

PCMCIA specification (including PCMCIA RAM/IDE) does not appear to be public.. (and no, browsing some Linux drivers is not replacement for specs..)

No specs = no emulation. (this is not important enough feature to do it the hard way)

[alexh]

Maybe you'll find it out there somewhere?? :-)

[Toni Wilen]

I found it

Anyone with SRAM (that has battery backup or similar) and any flash card and A600/A1200: if the card appears as normal block device in Windows (and in WinUAE's "Add harddrive", remember magic command line parameter because first block may not have RDSK identifier), could you create hdf dump (using WinUAE's built-in hdf-creator), zip and email the file? I'd like to confirm if I understood the structure of SRAM/Flash PCMCIA cards correctly.

Card can be empty but it must have been prepared on A600/A1200 first.

Thanks in advance.

[Blueberry]

Here is a sector dump of a 32k SRAM card prepared with PrepCard on my A1200 and formatted as ffs using the format command. The card contains just the Trashcan dir and its icon.

I used Hex Workshop, not WinUAE, to create the dump. I assumed you just wanted a raw dump of the card, right?

The card is actually 128k, but it has some bad sectors higher up, so I forced PrepCard to see it as a 32k card.

(should get hold of one of those 2MB cards on ebay...)

[alexh]

32k?

[Blueberry]

More than plenty for transfering 4k intros to other people's Amigas for testing.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Blueberry

Here is a sector dump of a 32k SRAM card prepared with PrepCard on my A1200 and formatted as ffs using the format command. The card contains just the Trashcan dir and its icon.

Thanks. Looks good, magic "CIS" string is visible as I was expecting. Need to implement some PCMCIA-specific Gayle bits and virtual attribute tuple space and (quite pointless) PCMCIA SRAM emulation should work.

[Toni Wilen]

Ok, so far I can insert emulated SRAM in emulated PCMCIA port, including extra minimal PCMCIA attribute SRAM tuples but unfortunately KS immediately decides to use it as a system ram expansion. Prepcard only says "Card is already in use as System RAM". (yes, it works fine as a memory expansion but that was not the point..)

I guess the reason is missing PCMCIA configuration tuples that describes it as a battery backed up SRAM card, not as a basic ram card.

PCMCIA spec is quite annoying and lists every possible tuple type without really explaining how to create properly configured battery backed up SRAM card. (yes, it is spec and specs are supposed to be confusing, I know..)

Can someone dump the A1200/A600 PCMCIA attribute area when SRAM card is inserted? 4000+ byte memory dump or so from 0xA00000 (for example 0xA00000 to 0xA02000) should be more than enough.

[Blueberry]

Hmm, the attribute memory of my 128k SRAM card seems to be blank, that is, every byte is -1. Maybe that is good enough for AmigaOS to see it as a disk?

I have experienced that a real Amiga did the same thing - configured the card as ram during startup if it was not already configured as a disk. The solution was to insert the card after bootup. Perhaps the only way around the problem is to implement hot-swapping of emulated cards...

I took a look at the attribute memory of a 4MB linear flash card as well. These cards can be read like SRAM cards on the Amiga, though not written. Theoretically, they can be written on Windows, though I have not been able to find a driver.

The attribute memory of the linear flash card is attached. I don't know if it is of any use to you, but it might illustrate how the attribute memory can look on a real card. After all, linear flash is almost the same as SRAM, at least for reading...

[Blueberry]

OK, now I managed to get hold of a real SRAM card with attribute memory. It is a 2MB Centennial card.

I have attached dumps of (every other byte of) the attribute memory of the card before and after preparing the card as a disk with PrepCard. Hopefully from these dumps you will be able to see how the Amiga likes its card attribute memory.

Any chance of this feature making it into 1.4.6?

[Toni Wilen]

SRAM PCMCIA emulation will be in next beta.

Seems to work except some card detection problems. Does "disk formatted" PCMCIA SRAM card automount if it is inserted after reboot?

ADDED: Detection works now properly, apparently PCMCIA interrupts are using level 6 interrupts. Only IDE interrupts are level 2.