Quote:

@post cards Also some (pc) motherboards have the post code display integrated which i found pretty helpful on ocassion.

Right. That's the same concept in a much simpler form. Those motherboards usually have say 4 led's that will light in a certain sequence of red/green during post.

Great job. Ah, now the waiting of my Amigaone board :)

Jim -

POST (Power On Self Test) is part of the BIOS function in a PC. Since time immemorial, PCs have had the feature of being able to output debug data to a small display device. Originally it was a header connector on the mobo, and decoded as I/O port address 0x80. You had to plug in an external display, hence you will often hear them referred to as "Port 80" displays. Later the connector on the mobo was scrapped and the Port 80 board was made a board to plug into the bus. The few that I've seen have two hex digits of display, enough to give you a fatal error message that you can look up in a table.

Good to see that PPCBoot - cum - U-Boot continues the saga.

tony

_________________
cheers
tony

Hyperion Support Forum: http://forum.hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php

The actual one that Jens sells is this one. It's fairly cheap, but you'd only want to buy one if you're a hardcore hobbyist or a tech.

The page has a blurb on it describing all the merits of his particular implementation, it's a short but interesting read.

Disclaimer - Jens didn't pay me to say this

> Is the GUI driven by mouse or keyboard or both ?

It's keyboard driven. Basically, it's a text mode interface. The reason for this is rather simple: Even though it's of course visually more pleasing if the GUI is graphical, this would require a lot of functionality that's used about once a year. Just ask yourself how often you really change settings in a BIOS ?

Plus, we have to rely on the feature set of the graphics card. It's the safest bet to assume a very basic feature set, and text mode is one that is present in all graphics cards, and is a standard that you can achieve without going through a VESA bios.

- New Articia S start-up code allowing for usage of two banks of unregistered SDRAM

So, does this mean that the Articia S (with the DMA-bug) is still used?!?!

Or is the A1-XE perhaps built in a way similar to the Pegasos April-fix to prevent these DMA-errors from occouring?!

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

Quote:

Well, I'm not Ben, but it is a card used commonly in PC's from the tech bench. If a system is not booting or failing during boot, this card will display a code at the point of failure. That could be, for instance, during initilisation of RAM. This would tell you to try a different stick of Ram or to at least start there. These cards are common in PC shops. I've used them many times, and they are extremely helpful. Basically it will tell you where the problem is, whether it's the motherboard that is dead, the CPU, memory, video card, etc. This is the one we use in house: http://www.micro2000.com/products/postprobe/postprobe.html Notice the LED digits. It will print out a 2 digit code upon failure. That code corresponds to a failure which is referenced in a lookup chart. These are meant for Techs mostly, not end users.

That's the same board I used at work, quite expensive buggers for an FPGA, a few LEDs and 7 segment displays... The whole microscope package is outrageously expensive.

It's good for warranty returns, especially since you can't put "it's dead" on a fault description, you can put "Port 80h POST probe shows m/b freezes on 0x2A, 'initialising dram cache'" etc.

Usually though, I've only found it's only good to confirm a dead motherboard. The information the POST card gives you won't help you fix a faulty motherboard. And if you don't keep your micro package up to date, the manual it comes with gets out of date... you have to look on the net for post codes (not that hard), wasting your time. It's certainly not worth the AUD $4000 renewal they were asking our shop for.

Cheers,

- Paul

lol, I'm still running this firmware version after all these months .

When will the next version of firmware for the A1 be released?

_________________
--
-=#Val#=-
Valiant@Camelot


Amiga 1000; Amiga 2000; Amiga 3000T; CD-TV; CD32;
AmigaOne-XE 800Mhz G4;Sam400ep 666Mhz;
AmigaOne X-1000 1.8Ghz PA6T-1682M