NEW USB Host Controller via ACSI

[troed]

So I've tried the FAT16 + Bigdos support now with the latest drivers, seems to work well*. For reference, if you're formatting a USB memory on a Mac you want to do something like this (from Terminal):

>diskutil list

Figure out which device is your USB memory. Important to get that right.

>diskutil partitionDisk /dev/diskX MBR "MS-DOS FAT16" "ATARI1" 25% "MS-DOS FAT16" "ATARI2" 25% "MS-DOS FAT16" "ATARI3" 25% "MS-DOS FAT16" "ATARI4" 25%

Replace 'X' with the number of your USB device. Mine was an 8GB stick so I opted for four partitions each 25% (~2GB) of the total.

/Troed

*) Well, the Atari actually only finds C,D and E ... it claims there's no F. There definitely are four partitions all exactly the same on the stick though. Haven't looked more into it.

[troed]

So I'm sure there was a post here Alan where you suggested that I should try some newer version of the drivers for my Unicorn + Mega STE SCSI HD hanging issues, but now I can't find it. Anyway, I've just tried it with drivers from late January and it now seems to work just fine!

/Troed

[alanh]

Awesome. All my changes had been committed anyway.

[Fujiyama]

I'm ready to try out my Unicorn USB and bought a USB-A to mini adaptor plug to supply power, but it turns out to be too wide to allow a USB memory stick to be plugged into the next USB connector.
So I'm thinking I might just take an old USB-A cable, cut off one end, solder the applicable wires to somewhere inside the MegaSTe I can tap +5V and GND, and plug the other end into the Unicorn's USB power connector (or use a USB power adapter -it really doesn't matter as I'll be recasing the computer anyway).

Have I got the power pins/polarity correct in the photo below?

7717-Edit.jpg

What's the yellow (IRQ) LED for by the way? Does it light up when there's some sort of hardware error?

[Atari74user]

Hi

Or, you could purchase a thin USB stick, you can get them, that's what I did to get around the compact design of both USBs on the Unicorn.

Kind regards

[alanh]

Honestly, I'd buy a USB hub. Plug that in, and get it in a better location that you don't have to mess about directly at the Unicorn.

[Fujiyama]

A hub sounds like a good idea. Should it be a powered type, or will the Unicorn supply enough power for an unpowered hub AND for instance something "power hungry" like a USB hard drive?
Can multiple USB devices be used at once? Like a mouse and USB stick, or two USB sticks etc? A USB keyboard is still out of the question, isn't it?

I verified the polarity of the USB power adapter's cable with a multimeter, and likewise the GND signal of the Unicorn's ACSI pins, so it appears I have the right voltage pins in the above photo (not taking a chance to fry anything)

[alanh]

Powered hub is better. And multiple USB devices can be used just fine. There is no keyboard driver.

[Maeke]

and, can it support an usb dvd-rw drive?

[alanh]

Yes, I've used a USB DVD drive myself with Anodyne Softwares ExtenDOS v4 software.

[Maeke]

and so it's the solution i was searching for, but it'll have to wait a few months.

[Fujiyama]

I found D-link 4-port powered USB hub which might be suitable for the Unicorn.


It has a 5V/2.5A DC and the specs talk about a standard mode with 500mA for all four USB ports and a max 1.4A or 2.4A charging mode. Not sure what that means, but I assume powering a USB DVD-RW drive would work fine with it.
There was some talk about USB up-/downstream a while back, and incompatibilities with certain USB hubs. Not sure about the details, but this was straightened out with later versions of the Unicorn which had some additional circuitry to resolve this, wasn't it?

[alanh]

There was some talk about USB up-/downstream a while back, and incompatibilities with certain USB hubs. Not sure about the details, but this was straightened out with later versions of the Unicorn which had some additional circuitry to resolve this, wasn't it?

Correct.

[Fujiyama]

Does this mean that just about any USB 1.1 compatible hub will do?

[alanh]

Yes.

[Fujiyama]

I'm trying to get my Unicorn to work with a Mega STe (TOS 2.06 and HDdriver 10.02) but am not quite getting there. I'm aiming to use USB flash drives to transfer files between my Atari and Mac.
The flash drive is an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer contour (I have no idea if it's USB 1 compatible as I believe Alanh said earlier that it has to be) and I've formatted in in "Disk utility" on the Mac to "MS-DOS (FAT)" and this posting helped explain the AUTO folder order, so using "Autosort" I rearranged them to this order (I have ETH.PRG and MOUSE.PRG disabled since I have no use for them):

USB.PRG
STORAGE.PRG
UNICORN.PRG

If I have the flash-drive inserted before rebooting the computer appears to freeze when it gets to "Scanning USB devices.... please wait" during the bootup sequence.
If I remove the USB flash drive and reboot it gets past that stage and on to the TOS desktop, so it appears the flash drive is the cause (EDIT: after a few minutes it got past this screen after all, so maybe the Unicorn drivers just gave up reading the drive?)

In HDdriver there's a "Bus 3: USB mass storage" entry in the "Bus" window, but nothing associated to it shows up in the "available devices" and "available drives" windows, unlike my two CF memory cards (attached to a MonSTer board) which show up as expected.

I suspected I may need to partition the flash drive within HDdriver instead of on the Mac, but if I don't see the flash-drive, how can I do that?

Oh, I almost forgot: I've also tried formatting the flash drive on the Mac the way Troed suggested and have the latest Unicorn TOS drivers which I downloaded from here.

[alanh]

If the Unicorn doesn't see the USB drive, then there's either something wrong with the USB flash drive or the Unicorn itself.

Have you tried another USB flash drive ? or even a USB mouse ? Just something USB ?

Just load USB.PRG and UNICORN.PRG and see if it scans anything on the bus to confirm that the Unicorn is working. If it does, then try a different USB flash drive.

[czietz]

Fortunately, the offending instruction is 0x1686 or MOVE.B D6,(A3), a rare instruction that occurs only once in the Unicorn drivers, more precisely in USB.PRG. So I guess this is the location of the crash.

At this location we have ...
[...]
move.w #$48,-(sp) ; Malloc
[...]

However, it is not normal for the GEMDOS Malloc function (called in the code snippet) to return 0xFFFFFFE0 (-32 EINVFN, invalid function number) in D0.

I can give a short update on this since I encountered the problem myself while working on some USB stuff for TOS. BigDOS (like Atari GEMDOS) is not reentrant, i.e. you are not allowed to call a GEMDOS function while already being in the middle of another GEMDOS call. BigDOS however takes a very drastic approach here: if it detects it is called from within another GEMDOS call, it will always return EINVFN (-32), regardless of the type of call.

The USB4TOS stack uses Malloc in some places, if one of these functions is called from within a GEMDOS call, it will fail as seen above when BigDOS is loaded. Imho BigDOS should at least return 0 (the only permissible error code) for Malloc, here; but it doesn't.

[Fujiyama]

If the Unicorn doesn't see the USB drive, then there's either something wrong with the USB flash drive or the Unicorn itself.

Have you tried another USB flash drive ? or even a USB mouse ? Just something USB ?

Just load USB.PRG and UNICORN.PRG and see if it scans anything on the bus to confirm that the Unicorn is working. If it does, then try a different USB flash drive.

Yes! Attaching a Logitech USB mouse works and shows up when booting.
If I also put MOUSE.PRG in the auto folder I can use the mouse as well. Seems like USB.PRG and UNICORN.PRG have to be run from the auto folder in that order, then have MOUSE.PRG (and I assume STORAGE.PRG as well, for the USB-flash drive) after those first two, correct? Like in this order:

USB.PRG
UNICORN.PRG
MOUSE.PRG
STORAGE.PRG

I noticed that if I disconnect the mouse, then reattach it then it won't work until I reboot the computer. Fair enough, but useful to know.
Another thing I noticed is that if I ran HDDRUTIL.PRG (HDdriver's configuration utility) with the USB mouse attached it locked up the computer. Maybe because it's not a read/write device as expected.

So... the USB flash drive I've plugged in should show up when booting, and without causing any significat delay before the TOS desktop appears?
It doesn't try to read the flash drive then (relying on a correctly formatted/partitioned device), but just "detects" what kind of USB device it is?

I'll see if I can find another USB flash drive to try out.

[alanh]

Fortunately, the offending instruction is 0x1686 or MOVE.B D6,(A3), a rare instruction that occurs only once in the Unicorn drivers, more precisely in USB.PRG. So I guess this is the location of the crash.

At this location we have ...
[...]
move.w #$48,-(sp) ; Malloc
[...]

However, it is not normal for the GEMDOS Malloc function (called in the code snippet) to return 0xFFFFFFE0 (-32 EINVFN, invalid function number) in D0.

I can give a short update on this since I encountered the problem myself while working on some USB stuff for TOS. BigDOS (like Atari GEMDOS) is not reentrant, i.e. you are not allowed to call a GEMDOS function while already being in the middle of another GEMDOS call. BigDOS however takes a very drastic approach here: if it detects it is called from within another GEMDOS call, it will always return EINVFN (-32), regardless of the type of call.

The USB4TOS stack uses Malloc in some places, if one of these functions is called from within a GEMDOS call, it will fail as seen above when BigDOS is loaded. Imho BigDOS should at least return 0 (the only permissible error code) for Malloc, here; but it doesn't.

Ugh, I remember removing these malloc routines before because of problems. Looks like David Galvez reversed them in a followup patch, that I didn't review properly.

I'll get those rogue mallocs removed in usb.c and hub.c

[alanh]

If the Unicorn doesn't see the USB drive, then there's either something wrong with the USB flash drive or the Unicorn itself.

Have you tried another USB flash drive ? or even a USB mouse ? Just something USB ?

Just load USB.PRG and UNICORN.PRG and see if it scans anything on the bus to confirm that the Unicorn is working. If it does, then try a different USB flash drive.

Yes! Attaching a Logitech USB mouse works and shows up when booting.
If I also put MOUSE.PRG in the auto folder I can use the mouse as well. Seems like USB.PRG and UNICORN.PRG have to be run from the auto folder in that order, then have MOUSE.PRG (and I assume STORAGE.PRG as well, for the USB-flash drive) after those first two, correct? Like in this order:

USB.PRG
UNICORN.PRG
MOUSE.PRG
STORAGE.PRG

I noticed that if I disconnect the mouse, then reattach it then it won't work until I reboot the computer. Fair enough, but useful to know.
Another thing I noticed is that if I ran HDDRUTIL.PRG (HDdriver's configuration utility) with the USB mouse attached it locked up the computer. Maybe because it's not a read/write device as expected.

So... the USB flash drive I've plugged in should show up when booting, and without causing any significat delay before the TOS desktop appears?
It doesn't try to read the flash drive then (relying on a correctly formatted/partitioned device), but just "detects" what kind of USB device it is?

I'll see if I can find another USB flash drive to try out.

No, the ordering doesn't matter.

Also, MOUSE.PRG isn't perfect and has it's issues, so I'm not suprised hotplug didn't work for the mouse driver, or that it locks up HDDRUTIL.

Try a different stick, I'm guessing the one you are using isn't 1.1 compatible.

[Fujiyama]

You're probably right.
I found another flash drive which I got better results with: it showed up in HDDRUL as a "generic udisk" (in the "devices" window) and also as a drive in the "drives" window. It also popped up on the desktop when adding drives (though no window opens to show its contents when double-clicked) so I believe the format is incorrect but it's detected as an available drive.

So in HDDRUTIL I selected the "7.9GB generic udisk" ("devices" window), then chose to partition it ("Medium"-"partition" menu) only to result in a never-ending busy-bee mouse pointer. Is this the correct way to make the USB flash drive useable with the Atari (and Mac), and if yes -does this mean that also this drive isn't USB 1.1 compatible? How do you check if something is USB 1.1 compatible when it's not mentioned in any documentation?

Additional info: I also found another 8GB Sandisk Cruzer (not the Cruzer Contour I first tried out) which shows up in HDDRUTIL, but when trying to partition it I get the error message "Can't determine capacity". Not sure what I should do at this stage. Ideas anyone?

[alanh]

If you can see the device then it should work. Therefore it should be 1.1 compatible.

How are you powering the Unicorn, and can you check you are getting 5V to it.

What version of HDDRUTIL ?

[czietz]

I find that older (e.g. 1 GB) USB flash drives are usually partitioned and formatted as FAT16 and so when used together with BigDOS will work right out of the box, i.e. without re-partitioning with HDDRUTIL. Now that Alan has removed the Malloc calls, there also shouldn't be any random crashes with BigDOS anymore.

(Disclaimer: I use a different host controller [not Unicorn] with the USB4TOS stack, but that shouldn't make a difference regarding which type of partitioning is accepted.)

[Fujiyama]

Alanh: useful info that if it's detected it also means it's compatible.
Yes, it gets the right power (I've checked with a multimeter). It's a universal USB power-adapter (for phones, iPod, iPad etc.) with the correct USB adapter plugs. The red LED lights up.
I was using HDdriver 10.02 when I wrote this, but recently became aware of a slightly more recent version (10.1) which I downloaded and replaced the current boot-driver with, and then it worked! Even with the generic flash drive which just resulted in an endless session of the busy bee mouse pointer.

Czietz: please explain the use of BigDOS together with HDdriver as I'm a bit confused about the partition/drive limitations of an ST running TOS.
It appears that HDdriver lets us use any sized drives, but in order for an ST to use that drive you first have to partition it into suitably sized logical drives (C, D, E, F etc.) which means 512MB or less for TOS 2.06 -correct?
But BigDOS is an extension to the disk-related part of TOS which allows bigger partitions to be used?

I did try to install BigDOS by putting it in the Auto-folder before everything else (Autosort is nice for re-ordering stuff) but this only resulted in my existing boot-partition (drive C) not being loaded at all! I see from the above website that the current version is from 1997, so perhaps it's obsolete together with the current version of HDdriver.
It would be practical and simpler to just have one huge partition that many small ones.