@Hypex

Quote:

What, only twice as much? You must have a real expensive Linux machine.

It was a custom built one with a high end spec though the graphic card is probably a little dated by today's standards. I did install Windows 7 on it once but never used it so reformatted the drive for extra storage. FSUAE runs flawlessly . Even tried Aros on it but that needs some more drivers, I think as it fell over a couple of times.

The catweasle is known to cause problems though I don't believe it to be the cause of all my troubles here. The SID chip works, I just wish there was a player to use it as well as using VICE.

Last edited by Arnie on 16-Jan-2015 at 07:20 PM.

@danwood

Quote:

Unfortunately not, they took the easy route and just slapped the AmigaOne name on a developer board from MAI logic iirc, hence all the many bugs.

Yes I was disappointed when they scraped the AmigaOne accelerator that used an A1200 as a dongle. Plus it would have cancelled all the "AmigaOne is not a real Amiga" arguments.

@Arnie

Sounds good for FSUAE which seems to have taken over from EUAE, although I tend to associate EUAE with PPC.

I find AROS can fall over in certain hardware. The same as that Commodore Linux OS can.

Are you using the Catweasel driver on OS4Depot? There could be some issue with the card but it shouldn't bring the system down like you are experiencing. Still you could test taking it out. SB Emu10K sound cards are also said to cause problems by messing up interrupts, but I have one in my machine and my CPU can run at 800Mhz.

Just to check how these UBoot vars compare to yours. Taken from OS4 NVGetVar.

video_activate=agp
serial1_address=3f8
serial2_address=2f8
parallel_mode=0
parallel_address=378
pci_irqa=9
pci_irqa_select=level
pci_irqb=10
pci_irqb_select=level
pci_irqc=11
pci_irqc_select=level
pci_irqd=7
pci_irqd_select=level
agp_enable=on
agp_sideband=off
agp_speed=2x

Last edited by Hypex on 20-Jan-2015 at 11:35 AM.

@Hypex

Quote:

That's sad, how long have you owned it? Perhaps I am one of the lucky ones but once I got a new PSU and found some RAM my machinre has been quite stable. I also have a 0680 card but had that for years, first upgrade IIRC.

Got it in 2007 as a used machine then, it did work pretty well for a few years, with odd times when it would lock-up a lot, but then it would be fine for another few months.

Quote:

Mine was okay at first, once I got some working RAM I got an SBLive! and later a 0680 IDE because I wanted UDMA on my drives. Then later I sought out a USB2 card, not for the hot plug issue really as I had a fix in place, but because I did need more ports. My fix only gave me two ports. Later I sought out a working USB2 card when we got USB2 support because I wanted the speed. Made mistakes buying VIA cards, OS4 USB2 driver does not work with them, or rarely does. Found an NEC card and now my USB2 problems are solved!

Yeah mine came with a SII IDE card which I did try replacing, I tried about 5 different PCI USB cards and could never get USB 2.0 working properly, at best it would work for a few minutes before mouse/kb became unresponsive and needed a reboot.

Quote:

It can conflict with the on-board IDE ports. Ten years ago more of us were on dial so didn't see the problem using a serial port for internet. But if you enable UDMA on the on-board IDE and transfer over ethernet it will eventally freeze due to a conflict of sorts.

I've never used the on-board IDE ports, only the SII via PCI and I've tried both with and without UDMA over the years.

@Hypex

My uboot settings seem to match yours. I'm using the catweasel drivers from update 5 I believe as the SID driver from update 6 didn't work file versions 53.1 and 1.5 for SID. That said its the same with catweasel removed.

I've tried 2 EMU10k1 cards and both the same not tried without but I'm swaying towards my ram as I've now limited it to 256M and it seems better. It no longer crashes on startup or during resets at least not in the short time I've tried so far. Dopus 4 did lock the system on exit thought but I also had timberwolf running at the time so don't know how much ram was left.

@thread

Just an FYI....

I've had numerous stability issues on my A1 XE G4 system. Most were actually caused by....

That monstrous Megarray connector between the CPU card and the motherboard.

Seems every time I started having stability problems, taking off the heatsink, then removing that CPU card and plugging it back in, then reassembing the heatsink, got back my stable system again.

I at one time had trouble getting it to stay powered up for more than a day, until I did that. Then I got that awesome 69+ day uptime I had reported in here a few years ago.

A year ago it got unstable again and I had forgotten about that. Got frustrated that nothing else I tried would work, and shut it off for a few months. A couple months ago I got serious about it and remembered the CPU card trick. After that I was able to go at least a week uptimes when it wouldn't last a day before that.

So if you haven't yet, it is likely time to pull that CPU card and plug it back in to the motherboard. Might just fix the issue.

_________________
This posting, in it's entirety, is the opinion and/or statement of the author and does not reflect the views and/or position of this site.

@DWolfman
Quote:

That monstrous Megarray connector between the CPU card and the motherboard. Seems every time I started having stability problems, taking off the heatsink, then removing that CPU card and plugging it back in, then reassembing the heatsink, got back my stable system again. So if you haven't yet, it is likely time to pull that CPU card and plug it back in to the motherboard. Might just fix the issue.

WARNING - only unmate/mate the meg-array as a last resort! It is VERY easy to damage the pins of the connector if this is not done correctly.

If you're unmating/mating the meg-array on a regular basis you increase the chances of damage. It would appear that you have some problem there that the unmate/remate of the meg-array will cure only temporarily.

Have you resized the spacers between the two boards?
The stand-off spacers originally supplied by Eyetech were too long (6mm or 6.5mm), and
caused the two boards to be way off parallel to each other, which is not ideal for a
good connection of the meg-array. These spacers should be reduced down to 5.2 - 5.5mm.
I sized my own to 5.2mm. The two boards are now absolutely parallel.

See here for the CORRECT way to unmate/mate meg-array connectors (page 11):
http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/320743.pdf

Last edited by raumfahre on 21-Jan-2015 at 03:57 PM.
Last edited by raumfahre on 21-Jan-2015 at 03:56 PM.
Last edited by raumfahre on 21-Jan-2015 at 02:39 PM.

@JurassicC

Big Bash!!!!

_________________
Amiga A1200, 3.1 ROMs, Blizzard 1230 MKIV 64MB & FPU, 4GB DoM SSD, Workbench 3.1

@raumfahre

I've only had to do it two or three times. And don't worry, I used to repair electronics so I know how to handle it.

A long time ago I had re-done how the bolts work for mounting the CPU card to the motherboard. I had trouble with the heatsink that came with it and wound up, like most A1 XE/SE owners, replacing it with a better one. I never understood why Eyetech mounted it in a way that forced you to remove the motherboard from the case (if the case didn't have an open space under the motherboard). So I redid it all so I could remove the heatsink, then remove two screws holding the CPU card down, and out comes the card, all with the motherboard still in the case and connected to everything else. Much easier.

As it is I think my problem is something that has plagued electronics for decades: oxidation on the connectors and sockets. I noticed the pins in the Megarray connector are not gold plated. As such oxidation will set in over time and can cause one or more pins to no longer have a stable connection after a while. The only way I've found to clear that up is to remove the CPU card and put it back, as just pushing on the socket doesn't seem to help.

Some may remember on the older Amigas (A500 thru A3000 at least) that you could just press all the socked chips into the sockets without removing them (they need to "creak" a little when pressing them) to get things back to normal again when it was acting up. This is the same thing, except the connector never seems to "creak" like the old chips did when you pressed on it.

For me it didn't matter what else I tried, or which RAM chips I had in it, the A1 XE G4 was unstable as heck until I pulled that CPU card and plugged it back in. Just sayin', might be what needs to be done if nothing else works.

_________________
This posting, in it's entirety, is the opinion and/or statement of the author and does not reflect the views and/or position of this site.

@Thread

Could be back in the game. Spent £10.20 on a compaq 512Mb PC133 buffered sdram and fitted in to slot 1. So far things seem to be a lot smoother at the full 800Mhz speed, touch wood it hasn't crashed on start up or within the first few minutes of use.

Still boots straight to Uboot settings menu though, is there a variable that stops or causes this?