English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Problem with CompactFlash Adaptor + ClassicWB

Bloodwych · 12 February 2011, 20:57

The fact you had to remove the card to make WHDLoad work in your previous standard Workbench points to the fact that you have a memory expansion that is PCMCIA unfriendly. Once you start to hit the RAM harder, like in WHDLoad games, it crashed with the card installed.

The issue, as explained above by Zetro, is that trapdoor fastram expansions (not accelerators) are meant to only add 4MB fastram, as the other 4MB is addressed to the PCMCIA port. Many expansions however add 8MB, by using the PCMCIA ports 4MB address range + the original trapdoor 4MB.

This works great, unless someone tries to add something mem or storage card to the PCMCIA port and you will get a crash when a certain amount of memory is used. ClassicWB is more demanding than a standard Workbench on memory, which is why it won't work.

What is the make of your fastram expansion? You may have a jumper on it you can move to make it PCMCIA friendly for when you need to use the card. Or perhaps it had software to limit its mem to 4MB temporarily. If not, it's a case of using the multiboot menu and startup sequences provided to create a very basic Workbench you can use to access the card, like you did before.

12 February 2011, 20:57	#7
Bloodwych Moderator Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: I'm behind you! Posts: 3,763	The fact you had to remove the card to make WHDLoad work in your previous standard Workbench points to the fact that you have a memory expansion that is PCMCIA unfriendly. Once you start to hit the RAM harder, like in WHDLoad games, it crashed with the card installed. The issue, as explained above by Zetro, is that trapdoor fastram expansions (not accelerators) are meant to only add 4MB fastram, as the other 4MB is addressed to the PCMCIA port. Many expansions however add 8MB, by using the PCMCIA ports 4MB address range + the original trapdoor 4MB. This works great, unless someone tries to add something mem or storage card to the PCMCIA port and you will get a crash when a certain amount of memory is used. ClassicWB is more demanding than a standard Workbench on memory, which is why it won't work. What is the make of your fastram expansion? You may have a jumper on it you can move to make it PCMCIA friendly for when you need to use the card. Or perhaps it had software to limit its mem to 4MB temporarily. If not, it's a case of using the multiboot menu and startup sequences provided to create a very basic Workbench you can use to access the card, like you did before.