smbaker wrote:

I got rid of the compactflash adapter and I'm seeing improved stability. Anyone else try that? To early to draw any concrete conclusions at this time.

I notice Sergey's compactflash adapter doesn't have a data buffer, whereas some of the other compactflash adapters (current Lo-Tech, etc) do.

Scott

thats interesting. I noticed mine hangs a lot with disk access, I put it down to something like DMA and timings related to memory accesses.

BloodyCactus wrote:

thats interesting. I noticed mine hangs a lot with disk access, I put it down to something like DMA and timings related to memory accesses.

I used "Champions of Krynn" as one of my stability tests, and one of the things it does is disk access. It could be why in the past when I've thought I had problems fixed and Checkit Memory Test was looking good, Champions of Krynn still failed intermittently.

I've heard from Sergey, and we're going to try to narrow down any differences in components between his build and mine. Fortunately with the Micro 8088 there are a lot less components to nail down.

Scott

I use a Lo-Tech cf adapter with my xi8088, and it's still unstable. the only thing that seems to make a difference is the number of cards installed.

It's been well over 24 hours now, and Champions of Krynn is still running on the compactflash-less computer.

I'm pretty please with how this is working out. I'm going to extend the experiment to a full 36, then I'm going to reinstall the compactflash, and see if the bad behavior returns. Then I'm going to try to follow Sergey's suggestion of playing around with alternate compactflash cards to see if it's one particular brand that is causing the issues.

I have been here with the xi8088. Make sure you have four or five expansion cards installed before celebrating stability.

keenerb wrote:

I have been here with the xi8088. Make sure you have four or five expansion cards installed before celebrating stability.

The Micro 8088 does have sip resistor pullups on the data bus and some of the control lines, and given that seemed to be where I was having issues with the Xi 8088 (specifically with my bus terminator board), it gives me hope stability will be better. It also has the SRAM behind a buffer.

Scott

After ~ 36 hours of continuous success, I reinstalled the compactflash adapter and booted from it. Krynn failure within two hours. I tried a different flash card (Fuji), failure within 2 hours. I'm now running it with a Viking card. We'll see if it does any better. One thing in common about all of my compactflash cards is that they're all relatively old, 64 MB - 128 MB cards.

I have the same card that Sergey uses in his machine, a 4GB Top Ram, on order. Should have it by the end of the week, then I can do an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

Scott

smbaker wrote:

After ~ 36 hours of continuous success, I reinstalled the compactflash adapter and booted from it. Krynn failure within two hours. I tried a different flash card (Fuji), failure within 2 hours. I'm now running it with a Viking card. We'll see if it does any better. One thing in common about all of my compactflash cards is that they're all relatively old, 64 MB - 128 MB cards.

I have the same card that Sergey uses in his machine, a 4GB Top Ram, on order. Should have it by the end of the week, then I can do an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

Scott

For whatever it's worth, I've been using an old 8mb and 128mb Sandisk card as well.

I had hoped to get mine together last weekend but my Mouser shipment was nowhere to be seen.

Of course, yesterday evening my wife tells me a package came Friday and she forgot to tell me, was sitting on the kitchen counter the entire time...

are these 3.3 or 5v cards or dual?

BloodyCactus wrote:

are these 3.3 or 5v cards or dual?

My card is supposedly dual voltage.

I see failures without a CF card at all (floppy only), just a simple batch file like:

:loop
goto loop

will eventually fail with a "L!OP NOT FOUND" or other similar obvious memory corruption issue, if I have several ISA cards installed.

I am looking forwards to building my new card tonight though, we'll see how it goes.

Got mine assembled, and it boots.. Only one memory chip, so only 512k, but it seems to be booting OK.

I need to tear down one of my othe rmachines to get my floppy controller and CF ide adapter installed, but this looks pretty good to me.

Great! I'm looking forward to hearing if this resolves your stability issues.

I've ordered all the parts I need to build a new backplane, with quality gold-plated connectors this time. It's always troubled me that my system if left unpowered for a few days, it'll require some jiggling of the CPU card to make it work. A reliability issue in my backplane build could manifest as all sorts of other problems...

smbaker wrote:

Great! I'm looking forward to hearing if this resolves your stability issues.

I've ordered all the parts I need to build a new backplane, with quality gold-plated connectors this time. It's always troubled me that my system if left unpowered for a few days, it'll require some jiggling of the CPU card to make it work. A reliability issue in my backplane build could manifest as all sorts of other problems...

It won't boot from my Sergery self-assembled floppy board, "Boot failed. Press any key to continue." That card works well in another system.

That's with on-board ROM disabled; with it enabled, I get very garbled bios boot screen and it freezes.

keenerb wrote:

smbaker wrote:

Great! I'm looking forward to hearing if this resolves your stability issues.

I've ordered all the parts I need to build a new backplane, with quality gold-plated connectors this time. It's always troubled me that my system if left unpowered for a few days, it'll require some jiggling of the CPU card to make it work. A reliability issue in my backplane build could manifest as all sorts of other problems...

It won't boot from my Sergery self-assembled floppy board, "Boot failed. Press any key to continue." That card works well in another system.

That's with on-board ROM disabled; with it enabled, I get very garbled bios boot screen and it freezes.

Yeah, lots of problems for me right now, but none that I can blame on the board yet.

It seems to run extremely slowly. THe POST beeps are about half the speed that they were on my xi8088, and it's hard to tell if the hotkeys are actually speeding anything up.

I can't boot from (or install to) any CF card on my Lotech XTIDE compactflash board. Half the time, with it installed, I get an unbootable floppy disk error.

If I run from floppy with xt-ide card installed I invariably crash running Ultima IV, even just from floppy.

keenerb wrote:

It won't boot from my Sergery self-assembled floppy board, "Boot failed. Press any key to continue." That card works well in another system.

I booted mine from the floppy board this morning. No issues. I do not have a ROM on the floppy board as I believe the BIOS supports it directly.

I do notice the post beeps are slower on mine as well. I think the code that computes delays in the BIOS has changed. We should ask Sergey about this, but my assumption is the slow beeps are not a problem.

I've not used the hotkeys yet, but a while back I did manually switch speeds by outputting to a port. I've been spending most of my time at 4.77 Mhz, at least until I've worked out whatever issue the compactflash has been giving me.

smbaker wrote:

I booted mine from the floppy board this morning. No issues. I do not have a ROM on the floppy board as I believe the BIOS suppo […]
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keenerb wrote:

It won't boot from my Sergery self-assembled floppy board, "Boot failed. Press any key to continue." That card works well in another system.

I booted mine from the floppy board this morning. No issues. I do not have a ROM on the floppy board as I believe the BIOS supports it directly.

I do notice the post beeps are slower on mine as well. I think the code that computes delays in the BIOS has changed. We should ask Sergey about this, but my assumption is the slow beeps are not a problem.

I've not used the hotkeys yet, but a while back I did manually switch speeds by outputting to a port. I've been spending most of my time at 4.77 Mhz, at least until I've worked out whatever issue the compactflash has been giving me.

If you jumper it for 14mhz when you use a 28mhz crystal the beep speeds up a LOT...

I've gotten 24 hours of steady performance now with some Magitronics floppy adapter. Time to start looking at why my malinov card is acting up. How do you have yours jumpered?

No matter how I configure it, my Malinov FDC card will NOT boot. Com2, COM1, all COM switches off, ROM enabled, ROM disabled, any ROM address configured, it never even seeks the drive.

I've flashed 0.9.4 bios, and I am spammed with IOCHK NMI dected. Type 'i' to ignore IOCHK NMIs, or 'r' to reboot.

Hitting "i" just repeats the prompt.

keenerb wrote:

How do you have yours jumpered?

From left to right, I have SW1-2 on, SW1-8 on. Everything else on the board is off.

JP1 is uninstalled.

I do not have a ROM installed. The 1.8432 Mhz oscillator socket is empty (I have probably never used the serial port). C17 is missing (did I forget to install that?)

EDIT: Looks like C17 is a filter capacitor for the internal data separator compensation. I suppose I really ought to install that... 😉

smbaker wrote:

From left to right, I have SW1-2 on, SW1-8 on. Everything else on the board is off. […]
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keenerb wrote:

How do you have yours jumpered?

From left to right, I have SW1-2 on, SW1-8 on. Everything else on the board is off.

JP1 is uninstalled.

I do not have a ROM installed. The 1.8432 Mhz oscillator socket is empty (I have probably never used the serial port). C17 is missing (did I forget to install that?)

EDIT: Looks like C17 is a filter capacitor for the internal data separator compensation. I suppose I really ought to install that... 😉

Thanks.

Have you tried ROM 0.9.4 from Sergey? The NMI error seems spurious to me, I don't think it's valid.

What floppy drives are you using? 2 1.44mb?

Honestly, this is some weird shit.

I think my Malinov FDC may be toast, it's not working in my Tandy either.

My machine only boots from a Magitronics floppy adapter, IF my Gotek is configured for S0 (first drive), but on the second drive connector.

If I use an XT-IDE controller configured at C800, it can't boot from floppy drive.

If I use an XT-IDE controller with rom at CA00, it boots, but keyboard doesn't work.

Pretty f*cking ??? if you ask me.