Is there a place where I can get the rom for the blizzard 1230 mk4 for winUAE?

[guybrush]

Not sure why WinUAE need a bios for the blizzard, but I am making a profile that mimic my real hardware, and without the bios I can't add the Blizzard 1230 MKIV sadly.


Is there a place where I can get it? Or do I have to dump my own ROM from my hardware? That would be quite a hassle to be honest. Thanks

[Zack]

In The Zone! (the download area at the top) there is a file called expansion_boot_roms*** that contains all/most known bios files for use with WinUAE.
If you don't have access to the zone, I will find a link that explains how.

[guybrush]

Originally Posted by Zack

In The Zone! (the download area at the top) there is a file called expansion_boot_roms*** that contains all/most known bios files for use with WinUAE.
If you don't have access to the zone, I will find a link that explains how.

Thanks!
Was a bit of a challenge to find it, but I found it eventually in the 2017 files folder I believe; was just marked "expansion_boot"; that zip file contains all the roms for the blizzard; thanks!

[CubeTheory]

Originally Posted by guybrush

Thanks!
Was a bit of a challenge to find it, but I found it eventually in the 2017 files folder I believe; was just marked "expansion_boot"; that zip file contains all the roms for the blizzard; thanks!

Im certain, im being an idiot but i can't figure out where it is, i've got access to the zone but all i can see is the latest files.

I'm trying to set up a profile for similar reasons, but, rather to mimic my A1200 tower that i stupidly sold in 2007

Any assistance would be much appreciated. thanks

[CubeTheory]

I was being an idiot. sorted it now. Thanks

[jotd]

I'd also like to mimic my A1260 phase 5 blizzard board, just to get fastmem at 0x79000000 (some games may fail depending on the location of the fastmem, yes, it's true)

Besides that memory location is there any interest doing that?

[Toni Wilen]

I probably answered this long time ago but address is currently hardwired because memory mapping used in Blizzard is not fully known. It basically has 4 different "banks", boot ROM code does memory test using all banks to find single contiguous address range.

It works this way because of different SIMM configurations + SCSI Kit works as a second SIMM slot. Phase5 really wanted to have single contigous memory with all possible SIMM combinations.

-> Nothing will happen until someone does list with as many as possible SIMM types: type/size of SIMM : Address range pairs. Or perhaps it also helps if someone disassembles and comments extremely ugly and unreadable boot ROM memory test code..

btw, OP: you probably already know but emulating accelerator does not improve CPU speed accuracy.

[guybrush]

Originally Posted by CubeTheory

I was being an idiot. sorted it now. Thanks

Glad you got that solved; it took me a bit to find the exact archive, which contains all the ROM files for different hardware.

[guybrush]

Originally Posted by jotd

I'd also like to mimic my A1260 phase 5 blizzard board, just to get fastmem at 0x79000000 (some games may fail depending on the location of the fastmem, yes, it's true)

Besides that memory location is there any interest doing that?

In my case it was to mimic the hardware as is; since I was testing blizkick before move on the real machine. Memory management on the Blizzard cards is weird; someone with more experience can probably go in details; I just know that some things does not always work as expected when I assign directly something to its memory (via asmOne usually, but saw some weirdness with C code too)

[guybrush]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I probably answered this long time ago but address is currently hardwired because memory mapping used in Blizzard is not fully known. It basically has 4 different "banks", boot ROM code does memory test using all banks to find single contiguous address range.

It works this way because of different SIMM configurations + SCSI Kit works as a second SIMM slot. Phase5 really wanted to have single contigous memory with all possible SIMM combinations.

-> Nothing will happen until someone does list with as many as possible SIMM types: type/size of SIMM : Address range pairs. Or perhaps it also helps if someone disassembles and comments extremely ugly and unreadable boot ROM memory test code..

btw, OP: you probably already know but emulating accelerator does not improve CPU speed accuracy.

Thanks for the info; this is all new stuff to me


Also I was not trying to emulate the accelerator for CPU speed accuracy but more as test of the memory and kickstart loading in memory. I can take some slack from the emulator in terms of cycle accuracy

[Toni Wilen]

Main difference with A1200 Blizzards (at least 1230, 1240, 1260. Note that 2060 is different) is that they does not have true autoconfig RAM but RAM is added by board's boot ROM which as an side-effect forces exec and expansion in chip RAM and RAM start address depends on SIMM sizes. (from 0x40000000 to 0x78000000)