sdbox for Amiga [Official thread]

[Tavis]

I just got an SDBox and I can’t get it to work on my Amiga 2000.
I tried mount SD0: from SD0 and it says could not open SD0 for input.
The drivers seem to have installed without issue.

When Amiga is off both red and green leds are lit.
When I power up the red led turns off.

I have a single .adf on the sd card.

Any ideas?

[stylon]

How big is the SD Card? Pretty sure they need to be 4GB or less and formatted as FAT. If you have a bigger card you can try partitioning it so that it has a smaller partition.

[Tavis]

Originally Posted by stylon

How big is the SD Card? Pretty sure they need to be 4GB or less and formatted as FAT. If you have a bigger card you can try partitioning it so that it has a smaller partition.

4GB FAT. Came pre configured with the SDBox from Amigastore.eu

[drphilxray]

My SDBox arrived from Amigastore 2 weeks ago, and using the most updated (v0.3!) drivers SD0 and spisd.device (in devs: ) and fat95 in L: -> you guessed it, no bueno Power LED and internal nano LED lit. Power is stable +5V (how many amps does this need?), and nothing is wrong with my A500 w/3.1 and GVP HD8+. Interestingly 2 things do happen: I get random flicker of the whole Amiga desktop (workbench) when not using interlace modes, and using CLI typing in "SD0:" I see SDBox brief activity led flicker x1, and ": bad number" as a response. SD0: reports being mounted. Very strange!

For the record, tried 2 SD cards of 1 and 2 GB max size, single partitions, fat 32 and cleaned using diskpart.

[Malakie]

Originally Posted by drphilxray

My SDBox arrived from Amigastore 2 weeks ago, and using the most updated (v0.3!) drivers SD0 and spisd.device (in devs: ) and fat95 in L: -> you guessed it, no bueno Power LED and internal nano LED lit. Power is stable +5V (how many amps does this need?), and nothing is wrong with my A500 w/3.1 and GVP HD8+. Interestingly 2 things do happen: I get random flicker of the whole Amiga desktop (workbench) when not using interlace modes, and using CLI typing in "SD0:" I see SDBox brief activity led flicker x1, and ": bad number" as a response. SD0: reports being mounted. Very strange!

For the record, tried 2 SD cards of 1 and 2 GB max size, single partitions, fat 32 and cleaned using diskpart.

First, did you add power via the USB connector? It requires power. Second, if you did and still no LED's, it is defective because even if your port were bad, it would still show power LED's.

I am running into a problem with mine.. and OS 3.2. I don't get what the heck it is with 3.2 and me trying to use it but this is the latest in a line of storage device problems I keep having with this OS. Works fine on 1.3 and 2.04 machines, which I moved it to for insuring it still is working.

Floppies work fine, printers work fine on this system but now that 3.2 is installed, I am back to another item that seems to not like it.

[Tavis]

The amiga stores support is terrible. I dont even know if i can return it for a refund... they dont respond or if they did it takes like a week.

last thing they said was "On one occasion something similar happened to us with a revision of A3000 and it can be solved by modifying the SDBOX.

If a modification is necessary, we will exchange the SDBOX for a modified SDBOX free of charge or refund you if you wish."

that was over a week ago.

Ive done everything i can think of. I did a parallel port loopback test to confirm my port is good and working, I've tried to manually mount the disk from he CLI, ive sent them photos of my setup and the screen.. it just doesn't work.

[Magic]

My SDBOX does not work on my A3000D. It seems to work fine here on both A4000D and A4000T machines.

[jbilander]

Thanks for reporting. (For the record, I have no affiliation with Amigastore, nor does Niklas)

Originally Posted by Malakie

I am running into a problem with mine.. and OS 3.2

I have not tested with KS 3.2 myself, since I don't have it, but I did test with 3.1.4 on my A1200 and I haven't had any issues there. It would be interesting if you could try with 3.1.4 and see if that works.

Originally Posted by Magic

My SDBOX does not work on my A3000D. It seems to work fine here on both A4000D and A4000T machines.

This is interesting. I don't have any big boxes myself to test with. I guess you are using a revision 1 SDBox. It would be interesting to try with a SDBox-v2 or the Mini on the A3000 since the communication-protocol is slightly changed/improved in v2 and the firmware is updated.

[Tavis]

I have an a1000 I’ll try it on

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by Tavis

I have an a1000 I’ll try it on

cool I was wanting to try this one day with my A1000 and kick1.3?

[Tavis]

Originally Posted by klx300r

cool I was wanting to try this one day with my A1000 and kick1.3?

That’s what I have

[jbilander]

Cool, it should work on 1.3, just some heads-up regarding the A1000. Use a proper gender-changer-plug for the parallel port, my advice. You might get away with a straight 1:1 plug if you remove the JP1 solder jumper blob (because otherwise the /RESET-line will be asserted as pin 16 is GND on the A1000). We thought of this potential problem of using a straight gender-changer when we did the pin assignments, hence why pin 23,24,25 are not connected to GND since the A1000 has +5V on pin 23. Double-check with the pinout on the schematic and don't plug in anything else on the A1000 with such plug without double-checking pinout. It'll most likely damage your CIA chips.

https://github.com/jbilander/sdbox/b...ics_rev_1a.png

https://github.com/jbilander/sdbox/b...rallel-port.md

Also on a stock A1000 you have very limited amount of memory so make the FAT-partition smaller, like a few hundreds of megabytes or so. A big partition allocates more memory from the system.

[Tavis]

Originally Posted by jbilander

Cool, it should work on 1.3, just some heads-up regarding the A1000. Use a proper gender-changer-plug for the parallel port, my advice. You might get away with a straight 1:1 plug if you remove the JP1 solder jumper blob (because otherwise the /RESET-line will be asserted as pin 16 is GND on the A1000). We thought of this potential problem of using a straight gender-changer when we did the pin assignments, hence why pin 23,24,25 are not connected to GND since the A1000 has +5V on pin 23. Double-check with the pinout on the schematic and don't plug in anything else on the A1000 with such plug without double-checking pinout. It'll most likely damage your CIA chips.

https://github.com/jbilander/sdbox/b...ics_rev_1a.png

https://github.com/jbilander/sdbox/b...rallel-port.md

Also on a stock A1000 you have very limited amount of memory so make the FAT-partition smaller, like a few hundreds of megabytes or so. A big partition allocates more memory from the system.

Yikes. I was about to just plug the SDBox into it.

[Malakie]

Originally Posted by jbilander

Thanks for reporting. (For the record, I have no affiliation with Amigastore, nor does Niklas)

I have not tested with KS 3.2 myself, since I don't have it, but I did test with 3.1.4 on my A1200 and I haven't had any issues there. It would be interesting if you could try with 3.1.4 and see if that works.

This is interesting. I don't have any big boxes myself to test with. I guess you are using a revision 1 SDBox. It would be interesting to try with a SDBox-v2 or the Mini on the A3000 since the communication-protocol is slightly changed/improved in v2 and the firmware is updated.

It worked on my A2000 restored machine. It works on WB1.3 and WB 2.04 and 3.1.4 as well, those all being A2000 systems. It works on WB 3.9, latest KS revision and even using the Raspberry PI accelerator on another A2000.

Only on this A1200, which used to run 3.9 and worked fine but now has been restored in a Checkmate desktop case and full upgrade across the board does it not work. The only major difference being I went with 3.2 and kickstarts for this time units restoration... and it will not work on this unit.

I am now restoring another dead A1200 unit and going to keep this one as a default everything factory spec. Once I get it running again, I hope, I will install 3.0 and see what happens but I would be willing to bet it works.

[jbilander]

Salocinx has done some excellent SDBox-testing on A3000D/A4000D and found and fixed a bug in the V2-driver.

This fix:
https://github.com/niklasekstrom/ami...95fe8800dbba40

I have merged his fix (from upstream) into my fork as well:
https://github.com/jbilander/amiga-par-to-spi-adapter

The strength of Open Source right there...people contributing to the community with their time, knowledge and dedication.

Many thanks to Salocinx!

Also, a new Rev of the SDBox-Mini PCB is available, Revision 2B. Populating U4 now with 74AHCT1G126 (instead of 74LVC1G17) will make it possible to tri-state 74AHCT1G126 (MISO-line driver) with a 2.0mm jumper-shunt on JP1 during ICSP-flashing of the ATMega328P with updated firmware, and then just remove it again after flashing is done.

[Tavis]

I finally got back onto this and finally managed to get my SDBox to work.
The main issues are:

1) the installer from Amigastore assumes you have Workbench 3.x or higher and installs the drivers into Devs/DOSDrivers directory which only exists in Workbench 3.x so if you have WB 2.x or lower, the driver becomes a file called DosDrivers and will never work.

2) if running on a workbench below 3.x, you need to edit the SD0 file and append an “SD0: “ to the beginning of the first line in the file or it will not mount.

3) you can not double-click the SD0 file under a WB < 3.x you must mount the drive from the command line.

So, after putting the edited SD0 and the spisd.device files into devs directory and installing the fat95 folder/files into the l: directory, you can then open a shell and type in mount SD0: from devs/SD0. If no errors then you must type in cd SD0: to get the drive to mount onto the desktop and you are good to go.

After that’s a success, you can then create an IconX-script containing:

mount SD0: from devs/SD0
cd SD0:
quit

And make sure its default tools are set to IconX to make it run the script.

You can also make the drive auto mount onto the desktop by doing the same thing but inside your user-startup script.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by AmigaDOS V1.3 enhancer software

Mount = If a positive value, MOUNT loads the device or handler immediately rather than waiting for first access

You could try adding Mount=1 to your mountlist to get it activated without CD.

[jbilander]

For information. The SDBox amiga driver spisd.device for SDBox-V2 and SDBox-Mini has been updated and fixed to now support large (in partition size) micro sd cards. FAT32 partitions above 4 GB is now possible, (TD64-support) yay!

Many thanks to Patrik for his contribution with this.

A quick note on howto build the new 2.2 driver:
You need to update to latest vbcc build target(s), which at the time of writing are:

http://phoenix.owl.de/vbcc/2022-05-2...68k-kick13.lha
or
http://phoenix.owl.de/vbcc/2022-05-2...8k-amigaos.lha

and also install the latest 3.2 SDK (NDK3.2R4) available here:
https://www.hyperion-entertainment.c...=form&file=126

update your vbcc-config file to point to the new updated target and the NDK3.2R4 headers. Running build.bat should now build, without any errors or warnings, and generate a new spisd.device 2.2 binary. yay!

Happy Hacking

[patrik]

Todays somewhat unnecessary info:

The fat95 filesystem handler which is commonly used with spisd.device to mount SD cards claims "* large harddisk support via TD64 or direct SCSI" in its readme.

However, in actuality it uses the NSD commands NSCMD_TD_READ64 (0xc000) and NSCMD_TD_WRITE64 (0xc001) to access 4GB+ drives, not the TD64 commands TD_READ64 (24) and TD_WRITE64 (25).

This does not matter in this case as the updated spisd.device supports both NSD and TD64 commands, but I found it a bit confusing so I thought I should share.

[patrik]

There is also a prebuilt spisd.device available in the most recent release:
https://github.com/niklasekstrom/ami...eases/tag/v2.2