Sonnet 7200 PCI programming

[Hedeon]

That was regarding a voodoo 4. I guess it should work in any slot but haven't checked recently. Could you post apciinfo and showconfig output?

[Cego]

here it is!

[Cego]

as far as i can tell, onboard ram and sonnet ram is overlapping the same adress space?
what’s up with those 3megs of fastram in showconfig? and why does it say 186.5megs when i have installed 192? very strange...

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by Cego

as far as i can tell, onboard ram and sonnet ram is overlapping the same adress space?

No. One address has 7 digits, the other 8. They don't overlap.

Originally Posted by Cego

what’s up with those 3megs of fastram in showconfig?

That's what you get with setting voodoomem in the mediator settings in ENVARC:. it is used for the spider and 100mbit networks cards. The sonnet uses it to set up its own memory.

Originally Posted by Cego

and why does it say 186.5megs when i have installed 192? very strange...

The same reason as why CHIP is also not exactly 2 MB.

Actually, from what you show, I see nothing that would prevent it from working.

[Cego]

hmm, so theres no need for me to look any further. I've put the cards back to their original places. :-/

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by Cego

hmm, so theres no need for me to look any further. I've put the cards back to their original places. :-/

Maybe someone else can reproduce the problem?

[Cego]

after changing the cards back to their original slots i got some strange behaviour.
The system is a lot crashier now. GearsPPC wont start at all. It'll give me a yellow alert and then a PPC Exception output. WipeOut is now running only with 5fps.
Heretic 2 will hang sometimes, but runs in fullspeed.

Man this is all very confusing. I've just changed the position of the cards and put them back to their original slot. I didnt change anything on the software side.

[Cego]

here is an outout from the crash:

[jack-3d]

What's your Mediator model?

I have verified following card order on three different Amiga setups with Mediator 4000Di MK3:

TOP
4. Empty
3. Sonnet
2. Voodoo3/4
1. Empty
0. Logic card
BOTTOM

If cards are in different order it's not working at all, or it malfunctions.

[Cego]

I have a Mediator 4000Di and it worked until now with following order:

TOP
4. 100MBit Ethernet card
3. Sonnet
2. Empty
1. Voodoo 3
0. Logic Board
BOTTOM

I tried following order and afterwards built it back to the previous order:

TOP
4. Voodoo 3
3. 100MBit Ethernet
2. Sonnet
1. Empty
0. Logic Board
BOTTOM

Now i get a lot of crashes after i've put them back to their original places.
Strange thing is, even 68k Gears is crashing, but in fullscreen mode both 68k and ppc gears is working.

[trixster]

My sonnet seems to work fine in any PCI slot, the order of cards doesn't seem to matter.

[grelbfarlk]

Something is probably just not seated right.

Tower:
TOP
5. 100MBit Ethernet card
4. Sonnet or Rapture
3. Voodoo 3
2. FM801
1. Spider USB
0. Logic Board
BOTTOM

Desktop:
TOP
4. Rapture or 100MBit Ethernet card
3. Sonnet or Ethernet
2. Voodoo 3
1. SB128
0. Logic Board
BOTTOM

[Cego]

hmm, in all of your configs the Sonnet is always over the Voodoo. In my problematic setup i had the voodoo right at the top slot.

regarding gears demo, it seems to work when i change the screen depth of the workbench to 16bit. In 24bit it'll just crash. Can somebody try to reproduce that on his setup and confirm?

[nexus]

if i was having these issues i would look at the mediator itself make sure everything is ok they arent put together with the highest quality bad solder joints etc also make sure no cpld's are loose or not sitting right also make sure you re-seated the ram in the sonnet

[Cego]

i have checked it several times. dont know what else to do.
maybe i'll do a fresh install of 3.9

[Cego]

i went back to pci.lib v12 and sonnet lib from aminet.
Wipeout seems to work normal again. I will try to put Voodoo in the top slot again and see if system will remain stable.

[Hedeon]

Never change more than one thing while looking for the problem. Also, the library on Aminet contains more bugs than the current one on git.

Plus software does not stop working one day to the next If it is not changed in some way like a virus or hd corruption. It is probably hardware in this case.

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Cego

hmm, in all of your configs the Sonnet is always over the Voodoo. In my problematic setup i had the voodoo right at the top slot.

regarding gears demo, it seems to work when i change the screen depth of the workbench to 16bit. In 24bit it'll just crash. Can somebody try to reproduce that on his setup and confirm?

Seems to work for me but only if gears runs fullscreen. If I try to run windowed it will crash if the Workbench is in 24-bit mode.
Same for 32-bit BGRA mode.

[Stedy]

Originally Posted by jack-3d

What's your Mediator model?

I have verified following card order on three different Amiga setups with Mediator 4000Di MK3:

TOP
4. Empty
3. Sonnet
2. Voodoo3/4
1. Empty
0. Logic card
BOTTOM

If cards are in different order it's not working at all, or it malfunctions.

That order is not guaranteed to work as technically, it violates one of the PCI system design rules. The last slot in a PCI system must have a card or diode termination. It's easier and cheaper to add a card. Without the diode clamping provided by a card in the last slot, the reflective wave switching of the PCI bus is not guaranteed to settle within the 30ns cycle time of the PCI bus.

Back in the late 90s when I built some Compact PCI systems, I learnt this rule (that is in the PCI spec) when my 8 slot rack failed unless a card was in the final slot.

Most PCs, of the era when conventional PCI was mainstream, had either the southbridge or IDE controller at the end of the PCI bus to provide the required termination.

Interrupt mapping, min_grant/max_latency and bus arbitration can also cause some weird operation. If a Sonnet card and USB device share the same interrupt, the isochronous interrupts created by the USB device can cause issues as they block the CPU from accessing the bus.

If you change the card setup, use pciinfo and note what Interrupt pins are listed for each card.

[nexus]

yeah i remember even on PC's we had to play musical chairs with cards all different based on chipset oem

though 1 good thing is we have bus mastering on all pci slots on mediator or so they say