Issues with ACA1233n, MuLibs, Acatool, etc...

[jurassicman]

Hi all,
I'm facing an annoying issue on my new Amiga OS 3.2 installation.

I've done a clean install of the OS and updated the system to 3.2.2.1

Since I have an ACA1233n card that has a Full 1230 clocked at 26.7 MHz I also installed the MMuLibs (included in the OS 3.2 disks) to avoid the message at boot that says to do so.

Everything was working fine, I installed a few softwares like avalanche, magic-menu, diropus and so on when I realized that in order to improve performance and stability (actually the system was perfect and I didn't have a single problem 'till then) I could install the acatool and the aca1233n library as well.

I did so, I installed the aca1233n.library and all the tools included in the package (ACAClock, ACAGov, ACAInfo, ACAMapROM, ACASetWaitstates, ACASwitchC0Mem, ACASwitchCPU and ACASwitchZ2Mode) leaving as installation paths the default paths (LIBS: for the library and SYS:Utilities/ for the Tools).

Once done I installed the tool acatool copying the executable on my C: folder. It is the latest version, 3.4.

I rebooted the system and once booted I ran the acatool command without options to use the GUI.

Here I set the MapROM function pointing to my 3.2.2.1 rom located in DEVS:
I saved and checked in the file S:startup-sequence if the acatool line was present and it actually was there:

acatool >NIL: skiponlmb force noerrors maprom romfile "DEVS:A1200.47.111.rom"

I thought that everything was good so I did a reboot but at boot I got a lot of errors about the start of programs due to lack of memory and, in fact, I had no Fast Ram at all.

Same thing after a reboot so I booted with no startup-sequence and commented the above line and everything went well.

I did modify the line leaving only the maprom option but that didn't solve and i still got the Fast Ram issue.

A few times, actually the system started correctly without any change from my side and a few times i got an error message saying that MMuLibs had to be started before SetPatch

I did a search to try to understand what was happening and I found a thread were, if i correctly understood, qomeone was saying that there are incompatibilities between MMuLibs and acatool. Is that true? If so should i uninstall MMuLibs?

[derSammler]

This is an issue with the first batch(es) of the ACA-1233n, mine has it as well. You can not fix that yourself but have to send the card to iComp to get the CPLD updated.

A simple work-around is to use MuTools instead for everything (MuFastROM / MuMapROM) and ditch acatool completely.

[jurassicman]

Really interesting... thanks for your reply @derSammler.

I've commented the acatool line and I'm using the maprom function through the ACAMapROM tool and for now it seems to work. I've this line on my S:Startup-Sequence:

SYS:Utilities/AcaMapRom/AcaMapRom file "DEVS:A1200.47.111.rom"

Do you think that I should use MuMapROM instead or my workaround could work as well?

[derSammler]

This will probably work until you want to use ShapeShifter and have to load PrepareEmul.

If possible, replace it with MuMapROM.

[jurassicman]

Originally Posted by derSammler

This will probably work until you want to use ShapeShifter and have to load PrepareEmul.

If possible, replace it with MuMapROM.

ok, I'll do that. Thanks again for your help.