Deallocating RAM from the Memory Pool

[Zetr0]

WOW!

thanks for the response guys truely an interesting read,

So by poking a bit or two and then resetting / re-init the pcmcia one could have CF card usage via the PCMCIA with 8MB Fast attached to the trap door?

what about network card would this also use a small data footprint?


Also now going to flip this question on its head a bit.

Lets say I have my 8MB Hawk board populated with 8MB of ram;

However I have set it up by jumpers to initialize only to 4MB of it.

Could I use the AddMem command while WB loads to add the other 4MB of ram ?

[rkauer]

Zetr0, my friend:

Short answer: no.

Long answer: no way. The hardware controller on the board only "recognizes" 4Mb, there is nothing in software you can do to force the (Amiga-wise) external RAM controller to change its state.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Zetr0

So by poking a bit or two and then resetting / re-init the pcmcia one could have CF card usage via the PCMCIA with 8MB Fast attached to the trap door?

I expect it not to work but it can be tested soon (with patched card.resource)

what about network card would this also use a small data footprint?

AFAIK only SRAM (and other directly addressable ram cards) need non-IO area.

[Doobrey]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I can do the patch (should be really simple) but is there program that can load on-disk resources? (I am too lazy to write one..)

http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/LoadModule
or loadresident in the Blizkick archive.

But IIRC, neither of them actually initialise the loaded modules, you need to reboot and let exec take care of that.. although it shouldn't be pretty simple to write a little app to emulate exec doing it.
Also, you'll need to bump the version number of the disk based card.resource higher than that in the kickstart based one, otherwise LoadModule/LoadResident won't load it (IIRC, it only checks the version number in the resident structure)

[Toni Wilen]

ROMSplit romupdates or rom (of course use correct rom). edit card.resource.

Disable >4M Fast RAM check: Find 0x00 0x60 0x01 0x00 (this is the address tested for RAM, near the beginning of file), replace it with something non-existing or ROM, for example 0x00 0xF0 0x01 0x00

Change version number: Version number is at offset 11 (decimal) counted from 0x4afc (for example 0x28 = v40, very beginning of file, change to bigger value). Version text strings don't need editing.

Use LoadModule to load it ("loadmodule module <path to edited card.resource>")

After reboot, check that card.resource is in resource list (use scout or artm or whatever)

Either it works or does not work. I can't help more.

[ppill]

When I try to load the modified card.resource I get:

'Loading yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy failed: object not found' and a recoverable alert.

When I try again I get:

'LoadModule failed: not enough memory available'

and there's almost 8 megs of free memory.

Maybe you need to load carddisk.resource first or some checksum fail?

[Toni Wilen]

I guess I have to help more after all

Which KS version? (exact version, including revision), original card.resource full version ("version full card.resource") and file size.

[ppill]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I guess I have to help more after all

Which KS version? (exact version, including revision), original card.resource full version ("version full card.resource") and file size.

I don't have my Amiga with me at the moment but it's the one by Escom probably the last version. Bought it as NOS.