My MIST crashes in Minimig by pressing F11 - Not exactly

[Paradroyd]

This is an odd problem.

I was using a piece of software I'd never used on MIST before (64 door, a terminal program). The program runs fine, but it requires you to hit the "Help" key to get to the options, where you can set the baud rate, etc. I didn't know what the equivalent key was on the PC keyboard, so I hit a few different ones.

As soon as I hit F11 the terminal program froze. The cursor stopped blinking, the middle (yellow) light on the MIST started blinking and the minimig seemed to be dead. The MIST itself was fine, I was able to get into the F12 menu and it was still working as expected. I reset the minimig via the F12 menu, and as it reset, it guru'd. After that, I clicked the left mouse button to continue, the minimig rebooted, and was fine. I thought it might have been something with the terminal program, so I tried turning the MIST on cold with no images loaded (hard or floppies). As soon as I touched F11, the middle (yellow) light on the MIST started blinking. when I reset (either via the F12 menu or ctrl-Left Amiga-Right Amiga, it guru'd, exactly as before.

The first time this happened, I was running Kickstart 1.3 (64 door is an old program), but I've since tried this with KS 2.04 and 3.1. F11 consistently causes a lockup-crash. There are no other weird issues that I'm aware of.

I noticed I was behind a couple of firmware versions so I updated. That didn't make any difference. I deleted all of my minimig config files and recreated them. Again, no difference.

I'm running the latest version of the minimig AGA core 1.1, so I tried core 1.0 and then a beta version of the core. Same thing..F11 (and only F11) caused an immediate crash. I also renamed my mist ini file to get rid of any joystick or keyboard mappings. That didn't make any difference either.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

[iceman]

No, I haven't - but then I only use minimig for Eye of the Beholder.

Next time I fire her up I'll try hitting F11 and see what it does.

[Total Eclipse]

Mine does it too.

From the official documentation

The HRTmon monitor is accessed with the F11 key. There are currently some problems with the HRTmon implementation - it is only recommended to use it without moving the VBR (chipRAM only).

I've not read up on what that means, but it looks like whatever happens when you press F11 is intentional.

[Paradroyd]

Mine does it too.

From the official documentation

The HRTmon monitor is accessed with the F11 key. There are currently some problems with the HRTmon implementation - it is only recommended to use it without moving the VBR (chipRAM only).

I've not read up on what that means, but it looks like whatever happens when you press F11 is intentional.

Thanks for replying. I was pretty sure that at least someone else would have the same problem. It probably is related to the HRTmon thing, but I doubt that this is working as intended. It immediately locks the machine up regardless of whether HRTmon is on or off in the menu, so it does seem like there's a bug involved somehow.

The other possibility is that it's actually opening some kind of terminal on one of the serial interfaces on the board for debugging. That might just look like a lockup if you didn't have anything connected there. At any rate, there should be a way to turn it off.

The other question is, if F11 is HRTmon, what's the help key mapped to?

[MasterOfGizmo]

F11 sends Amiga keycode 5f which in turn is the Help key on the Amiga. So f11 should be correct. I never used or tested that and thus cannot tell whether it's supposwed to work as a help key with hrtmon disabled.

[Paradroyd]

I stepped back to the latest version of the older, non-AGA Minimig core, which does not have the problem. I guess I'll just use that for any applications that need the "help" key until this is fixed in the AGA core.

[Paradroyd]

A little update on this.

It turns out that what's happening (so it seems) is that HRTmon ignores the MIST menu option and is always active whether it's activated in the menu or not. Apparently, I did not have HRTmon.rom on my SD card, so when I pressed F11 it was trying to run rom code that was missing, and so never loaded. Once I figured this out and put HRTmon.rom on the SD, F11 doesn't lock things up, it runs HRTmon properly, but no matter whether it's enabled in the menu or not.

If the toggle worked as I think it's supposed to, turning HRTmon off in the menu should (I think) send a help key press for F11 instead.

[mahen]

Indeed, I noticed this behaviour as well ! So far it only annoyed me in Pinball Fantasies ECS (as Help is used to toggle the datadisk).

[Paradroyd]

I noticed it because I use "64 Door", which is a PETSCII capable terminal program. The help / F11 key is the only way to get to the menu to set the baud rate, screen width, etc.