Announcing ready to use freemint sd card images for the ST

[marcello]

Is this Freemint working Ok with a 16MHZ machine? I mean MSTE or Mega ST with 16MHZ booster and AltRAM?

Well most probably ! I actually do most of the work on Hatari with an emulated 32 Mhz, so that should play no role.
Testing is done on real HW.

[qq1975b]

I will try...never used MiNT....

[AtariZoll]

Is this Freemint working Ok with a 16MHZ machine? I mean MSTE or Mega ST with 16MHZ booster and AltRAM?

Well most probably ! I actually do most of the work on Hatari with an emulated 32 Mhz, so that should play no role.
Testing is done on real HW.

Must be aware that emulators not emulate cache in Mega STE or 68030 cache. So, when you set emulator to 16 MHz it is not same as real Mega STE - less problem is that real MSTE is slower than full 16 MHz, but some SW may have problems with cache. So, only relevant test is real HW . As there is no one who owns all possible Atari models and their versions, then possible accelerators - we need that people testing more, and give feedback, describe experiences in forums.

[kenbeck]

Although it's probably not its primary purpose (and you might not even know it), your image is perfectly suited to run MiNT on the MiST!

I have copied over everything from your download image to a HDDRIVER formatted one, renamed MiNT's MFP driver (as it seems to be incompatible with the MiST) and have a very neat MultiTOS setup for the MiST!

[/quote]

I have been unable to get this to work. I can format an SD card and get it partitioned in the MiST w/out difficulty, and use Hatari to copy files to that card. My problem is that the resulting card bombs in the MiST.

Could you post more details about your process?

[ccarl84]

Hello,
I just did the test with a 1040 STE with 4MB of ram.
This to work well.
Do you think I can try with my MSTE? Or my TT?
Y is there a risk? (for my matèriel or my hard disquers ...).

Thank you.

And good luck.

ccarl84

[marcello]

Yes go ahead I would be interesting to know if it works on the MSTE.
For the TT you should rather go with EasyMint, as I am targetting the 68000 ( hence the very old AES)

[Kirkman]

I can verify it works on my Mega STe via CosmosEx. 4mb ram.

[marcello]

I found the Freemint trunk from Helmuts' CVS branch work quite well on my STE, so I am probably going to swtich to that for the next releases of ST Mint.
Here I've read some intruction ( in german) about installing Easymint using Helmut's CVS Branch on a 68000 ST (note that it crashes if you don'T have 8MB RAM)
http://forum.atari-home.de/index.php?topic=11675.0

[AtariCrypt]

MKMD has been replaced by ST Mint, based on Freemint 1.15 which will allow much more interesting stuff to work ( ethernet card !)
Get the new sd card image at http://subsole.org/st_mint.

I've just installed this on my Mega STe (transferred using a Mac /dd command)
Working a treat! Thank you

Steve

[qq1975b]

Is there any ready to use version for TT or Falcon?

[marcello]

It should work on TT and Falcon too, but untested. Report your findings here !

[AtariCrypt]

Thanks for your efforts, my Mega STe loves this. As do I
Steve

[mghodge]

It should work on TT and Falcon too, but untested. Report your findings here !

I can confirm this does not work on a Falcon with 14MB and CF card reader. The HDD driver is never read from the card and the machine boots to default ROM desktop.

[joska]

It does not boot on the Falcon because the harddisk driver is configured to look only for ACSI devices. The Falcon does not have ACSI.

[Bikerbob]

I see no post on this since Aug 2016. I downloaded the image today. I have just finished upgrading my STFM 520 to 4mb - I also have a micro cosmos. So I am hoping this is going to work. Thanks so much for making this. Trying things out like this is exactly what I enjoy retro computing for.

James

[marcello]

Thanks for the update concerning the falcon.
I have in the works a version with a recent kernel and ext2 fs but it is *slow* ( as expected)
Are there any FreeMint developpers here, or they're all on https://sourceforge.net/p/freemint/mail ... t-discuss/ ?

[Foxie]

At long last, I can now play around with MINT! Never having owned a Falcon or TT, I've never investigated it. Previously, it seemed difficult to set up in an emulator.

I have one question though - when it boots under emulation, it says "Original MFP with weird clock." What does this mean? I thought all MFPs had exactly the same clock frequency? Or are they talking about the ratio between CPU clock and MFP clock? I know STs vary in their CPU clock frequency.

I'd also be interested in learning which of the MFP timers MINT uses for its own internal uses. Are timers A, B and D still available for applications to use?

[mikro]

Are there any FreeMint developpers here, or they're all on https://sourceforge.net/p/freemint/mail ... t-discuss/ ?

Some (me for instance :)) of them are also here but it's always better to communicate on the mailing list.

[Galvez]

Thanks for the update concerning the falcon.
I have in the works a version with a recent kernel and ext2 fs but it is *slow* ( as expected)
Are there any FreeMint developpers here, or they're all on https://sourceforge.net/p/freemint/mail ... t-discuss/ ?

If you send a mail to the MiNT mailing list you need to be patient these days, there are some known issues with mailing lists at Sourceforge and some mails are delivered with delays or bounce. One mail that I sent 6 days ago arrived an hour ago and I've just sent an email to the EmuTOS mailing list and it bounced.

[Galvez]

I have one question though - when it boots under emulation, it says "Original MFP with weird clock." What does this mean? I thought all MFPs had exactly the same clock frequency? Or are they talking about the ratio between CPU clock and MFP clock? I know STs vary in their CPU clock frequency.

This message comes from the mfp.xdd module, from https://github.com/freemint/freemint/bl ... /mfp/mfp.c (look the detect_MFP_speeder function:

Code: Select all

   /* for RSxx or standard MFP we have 8 bittimes (count=16) */
   DEBUG (("mfp: detect_MFP_speeder: count[1200] = %ld\n", count));

   if (count < 10)
      /* less than 5 bittimes: primitive speeder */
      speeder = MFP_WITH_PLL;
   else if (count > 22)
      /* something wrong - too slow! */
      speeder = MFP_WITH_WEIRED_CLOCK;
   else

[Foxie]

This message comes from the mfp.xdd module, from https://github.com/freemint/freemint/bl ... /mfp/mfp.c (look the detect_MFP_speeder function:

Ah, it looks like this is related to high speed modem port modifications? I haven't looked in detail at how those work. I was under the impression that some of those modifications use a spare output line (ACIA RTS or YM chip bit 7) to enable the higher speed clock. Are some people just putting a PLL in between timer D and TX/RX clock?

I'm not really sure why Hatari has a weird clock, but I think the modem port implementation in Hatari is incomplete.

It seems like the best way to get a higher speed modem port is to use an MCU to do clock extraction on the incoming data. That would allow you to go up to about 1 megabaud without overclocking the MFP. I'm not sure if anyone has done such a modification?

There's another possible modification which involves running the 500kHz ACIA clock to the MFP, allowing MIDI input and output via the modem port. I suppose MINT would also detect this as a weird clock.

I did some tests to measure interrupt latency on MINT, and to my surprise the figures were barely any worse than standard TOS. The ACIA interrupt handler is still as slow as TOS, so a MIDI sequencer would still need to trap that routine and replace it. My test program used timer A, seemingly without upsetting MINT. I'm not sure if timer B is available for use.