Sonnet 7200 PCI programming

[strim]

Originally Posted by Hedeon

All part of the big plan, muhaha!

Let's not go overboard, it's just automated Jenkins update that worked fine, but new Jenkins version needed Java 8, which of course didn't update at the same time...

Anyway it's fixed now, Jenkins is back online.

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by strim

Anyway it's fixed now, Jenkins is back online.

I never get rich this way...

[strim]

Originally Posted by Hedeon

I never get rich this way...

If you're into that, perhaps slapping a PayPal donate button somewhere near downloads will be more effective ...

[grelbfarlk]

How about a kickstarter to finish iFusion? I'll put in ONE HUNDRED YOU ESS DEE. That's a hundirt simoleons. A hundred greenbacks. You can buy 101 99c hotdogs with that! Who else will match me?

[amigoun]

Same here, having iFusion running is worth spending some bucks.

[kev]

better yet start a patreon
also having more cache is always better as thats mem running at faster speeds less talking to RAM which runs slower

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by kev

better yet start a patreon
also having more cache is always better as thats mem running at faster speeds less talking to RAM which runs slower

I guess I'm not sure whether the stuttering I was experiencing with the 512Kb card was due to the lower speed or the lower amount of L2. My memory is a little hazy about this but I think at the time all of the cache was running at 166MHz or he might have had 133MHz already defined for the 512kb.

At any rate the L2 cache speed is set in software with the following dividers, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3. So at 400Mhz the 512kb is using the 3 divider and 400MHz 1MB is using 2. If we could find fast enough cache chips or a different brand then I used, maybe 400MHz boards could run the L2 cache with the 1.5 divider at 266MHz.

Surprisingly my 250MHz chips would not run at 266MHz wth 1.5. Or to get really ambitious 400MHz L2 cache at 1 or no divider.

I'm not sure which crowdfunding or bounty site is the best to use, I'm thinking get people to kick in whatever they feel is worth throwing in then the author just cashes in when a stable version is released.

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by trixster

Here's a good one for you: the getinfo from #267 doesn't seem to work for me from a CLI, it only works by double-clicking and executing from workbench. It just locks up the CLI. No idea why.

GetInfo or GetInfo_PPC?

[kev]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

I'm not sure which crowdfunding or bounty site is the best to use, I'm thinking get people to kick in whatever they feel is worth throwing in then the author just cashes in when a stable version is released.

patreon is a monthly subscription service where each person can pay little or a lot depending on what the dev sets so this gives the dev a incoming pay to continue working while giving users somethin sooner in return i think its a much better way than kickstarter using CEMU wii u emulator for example that dev releases a new version every 1-3 weeks and lately has been making 10k's a month just for. i see it like a dev for hire deal people can continue to pay each month for continued work on what they want done

https://www.patreon.com

[kev]

you want faster cache chips steal some from a pentium slot 1 or athlon slot a cpu card those ran at half the cpu speed

One limitation (also afflicting the Intel Pentium III) is that SRAM cache designs at the time were incapable of keeping up with the Athlon's clock scalability, due both to manufacturing limitations of the cache chips and the difficulty of routing electrical connections to the cache chips themselves. It became increasingly difficult to reliably run an external processor cache to match the processor speeds being released—and in fact it became impossible. Thus initially the Level 2 cache ran at half of the CPU clock speed up to 700 MHz (350 MHz cache). Faster Slot-A processors had to compromise further and run at 2/5 (up to 850 MHz, 340 MHz cache) or 1/3 (up to 1 GHz, 333 MHz cache)

use those above u can run a 1:1 with cpu speed

[spudje]

OK seller confirmed these are 2K refresh as well http://www.ebay.com/itm/64MB-Apple-P...-/391702662602. Ordered 3, fingers crossed.

[grelbfarlk]

I created a new page on the wiki with system config stuff, ENVs, library versions and some MMU stuff.

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/SonnetA...ki/Good-Config

[trixster]

I doubt that anyone will be surprised to hear that I've been having a few issues with my sonnet over the last few days. Initppc would initialise the board and ram would be added to the system but no program/game would load - double clicking would result in a brief flicker of hd access and a small inc in 060 cpu usage but then nothing, WB would just sit as if nothing were occurring.

The most frustrating thing is I've not made any changes to my set up.

Upon reading on GitHub about the snag with deficons I removed that from wbstartup.
Now (touch wood, all fingers crossed) the issue seems to have gone away - all progs/games run fine again.

A bizarre instance. I'm sure my setup is a difficult environment for the sonnet to work in as I'm seemingly having many more teething problems than anyone else, and I guess this tells me loud and clear that i should be starting a fresh install of OS3.9. But it works ok again now with deficons removed.

Hmm, I ordered the 3x64mb ram sticks from the ebay link from trixster. I received three different sticks:
HY5117400A - I think this one's 2k refresh, same as trixster has
SEC KM44C4100BK-6 - no idea
NANYA NT511740C0J-60 - think this one's 2k but not 100% sure

Any ideas here guys?

[Wrangler]

Having been burnt on this, my advice is check explicitly on the refresh rate with the seller first but failing that just try them out because you may be lucky. Grelbfarlk has some 4k ones that work.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by esc

Hmm, I ordered the 3x64mb ram sticks from the ebay link from trixster. I received three different sticks:
HY5117400A - I think this one's 2k refresh, same as trixster has
SEC KM44C4100BK-6 - no idea
NANYA NT511740C0J-60 - think this one's 2k but not 100% sure

Any ideas here guys?

SEC KM44C4100BK-6 Appears to be 2k.
NT511740C0J-60 Appears to be 2k.

[Hedeon]

I haven't researched it further, but the thing that is conflicting is that deficons actually opens stuff to look inside for identification. When I remove the deficons config file from envarc (so leave deficons in my wbstartup) everything works fine too.

I speculate that if you open the config file of deficons and deactivate the stuff that actually need to look inside (so file name patterns and stuff you can leave activated) it will probably work too.

Untested, just a theory. When I have the time I have to look into how deficons determines some stuff (like determining executables, it looks at $000003F3 for first word in the file). Maybe do a work-around.

Originally Posted by trixster

I doubt that anyone will be surprised to hear that I've been having a few issues with my sonnet over the last few days. Initppc would initialise the board and ram would be added to the system but no program/game would load - double clicking would result in a brief flicker of hd access and a small inc in 060 cpu usage but then nothing, WB would just sit as if nothing were occurring.

The most frustrating thing is I've not made any changes to my set up.

Upon reading on GitHub about the snag with deficons I removed that from wbstartup.
Now (touch wood, all fingers crossed) the issue seems to have gone away - all progs/games run fine again.

A bizarre instance. I'm sure my setup is a difficult environment for the sonnet to work in as I'm seemingly having many more teething problems than anyone else, and I guess this tells me loud and clear that i should be starting a fresh install of OS3.9. But it works ok again now with deficons removed.

[trixster]

Well my excitement at get running again after removing deficons was 'false news'.

Despite doing that and then enjoying an afternoon and evening yesterday of using the sonnet without issue, with multiple soft and hard reboots, today my problems have returned. Nothing has changed since yesterday but when I turned the Amiga on this afternoon and started initppc I can again no longer load any ppc programs.

I have tried the latest build from Jenkins and I get this error:



I have since tried disabling everything again, going back to as basic a set up as possible but no good, the damn thing won't work. I've tried every combination of ram I can try, I've checked and double checked mmu-configuration.

Of course when I can find a large block of time I will try and fresh install but in the interim I'm stuck. I cannot fathom why it works flawlessly one day but then not the next on the same config unless there is a hardware flaw with the card.

[Hedeon]

After all the resets and stuff, did you use the build version which works last for you? Don't go changing too many variables. Maybe the latest build does not work on your system. Or did you had a working system yesterday with the latest build?

[trixster]

The thing is, I'm not changing any variables. I had a Working system yesterday, hours of up-time, hard and soft reboots. Today, exact same system, it now won't work. So I've tried today the latest PowerPC.library and I get the ram_lib Exception shown in the photo everytime initppc is launched. The previous version of PowerPC.library was the one off aminet from earlier in June, it did not pop up the window shown above but the results are the same.