Amiga Test Kit memory results

[NoBrain2k]

Hi all


I've been having issues running WHDLoad games on my expanded A500+. Some games work great, some don't. A good example is Apidya - I can boot an Apidya floppy and play the game flawlessly but the WHDLoad version crashes my Amiga (Guru meditation etc)



I've tried lots of things, but the next thing I want to do is test the memory. I've run Amiga Test Kit's memory test and got the attached results but I'm not sure how to interpret them. It says 'X' means there's an error but there are so many Xs on the 16bit and 32bit bus lines that I wonder if that's expected results on my particular model of Amiga. Can anybody help me understand whether the results are correct or not?


Thanks

[Daedalus]

Something's wrong with your fast RAM setup by the looks of things. Apidya might only use chip RAM by default, which is why it runs ok from floppy, but crashes when WHDLoad tries to force it into fast RAM. What config are you running? What does ShowConfig say? Does it work ok for other stuff? Having all Xs like that means it's not just a couple of bits that have an error, so it's most likely an addressing fault, or RAM is being configured that doesn't actually work or exist.

[NoBrain2k]

Thanks for responding. Yeah, what you're saying makes total sense.



I'm not at my Amiga right now (sadly) but I will get the ShowConfig output later and report back.


I can give you a bit more detail on my setup though - I have a Wicher 500i with 8mb of EDO memory, Amiga OS 3.1.4 with Kickstart 3.1.4 and a 16gb CF card formatted with PFS. I also have a 2mb chip ram expansion in the trapdoor. I had the same issues with Kickstart 3.1 and had wondered if it was some sort of large filesystem issue and therefore hoped that 3.1.4 might help. Sadly it has not!


I have tried 2 different sticks of EDO memory and had the same results from trying WHDLoad games. One thing I have never tried is changing the 'timing' setting for the RAM on the Wicher (for fear of breaking things even more), maybe it's as simple as doing that...

Oh yes you asked about other stuff - Amiga OS works great, and most hard disk installed games seem to work fine when they've come from original floppies. Theme Park runs nice and smooth when accelerated but crashes a lot, but I gather that's not particularly unusual. Some WHDLoad games work without issue, for example Pinball Dreams. I can switch speeds on the Wicher and see improvements on the chart in SysInfo. Most tracker software seems to work fine, but the bundled software with Techno Sound Turbo crashes as soon as I try to record the input, Pro Tracker et al seem to work fine even when sampling. Valhalla games all work flawlessly and games that notify you when additional ram is detected seem to do so happily, though I expect they're looking at chip ram. Oh and it's worth me mention that when using another memory tester application (something older, cli based, may be memtest or memcheck or something) it also crashed my Amiga

[Daedalus]

Hmmm, the extent to which various programs are using the fast RAM might be different. I always remember Theme Park crashing only occasionally, most of the time letting me run big games for many hours on an 060, so frequent crashes shouldn't be happening. As for the trackers etc., it's common for them to use chip RAM for audio data so they might be avoiding the issue. I don't know for sure, but I would suspect the one that's crashing was recording to fast RAM so that it could record more data than without.

An interesting test of Workbench would be to copy around 8MB of data into the RAM disk and back out to a new location to see if that causes it to fall over. A faulty address line could cause the fault to consistently kick in only when a certain area of RAM is accessed - the RAM test results only show that the fault occurs within the first 512KB of fast RAM, not the exact address.

It's definitely worth changing the memory speed setting to see if that fixes things.

[NoBrain2k]

Thanks very much Daedalus, I'll try everything you have suggested

[NoBrain2k]

Right here's the latest from tonight's experimentation...

First of all I tried the copying into the ramdisk. I took the directory containing Valhalla and dropped it into ramdisk and sure enough about 10% through copying my Amiga locked up (no guru, but completely frozen screen)

So I tried the different ram timings which seemed to have no effect to either the test kit results or the ramdisk copy. I then thought I'd try an alternative stick of RAM with different timings, but this too gave the same results.

Starting to feel a bit desperate I decided to remove the RAM and give the contacts a clean with some isopropyl alcohol and after doing this I managed to get the ramdisk copy of Valhalla to 60% but I think we can disregard this as a fluke as I've not been able to reproduce this since. Perhaps this was more to do with the fact I did it at a very clean boot before WB could shove an extra few hundred K of data into RAM.

So I hadn't really gotten much further. ShowConfig seemed to report sensible stuff (attached).

But then, finally, I decided to look at some of the other memory options in Amiga Test Kit and went on to the Direct Memory Scan screen. I didn't have time to let it complete its scan (it looked as if it was going to go on forever) but it did say 6.0mb total detected (should be 10) and "4 holes in memory map?". Also attached. Sounds like something weird is going on.

I've ordered some more sticks of EDO memory to see how I get on with those. These are 16mb sticks so I'm hoping that the Wicher will just address the first 8mb (I've reason to believe it can) assuming that the version of Wicher that I have doesn't have the 16mb support.