New board: MonSTer

[Fujiyama]

Finally having some free it's time to install my MonSTer in my MegaSTe. Having read the documentation and most of this thread I hope I've got it right, but I'd like to have this confirmed. The photos (click them for full size) might make things clearer for others asking about the same

1) Having unplugged the MegaSTe, remove the 68000 CPU chip (using a dedicated PLCC removal tool or a tiny screwdriver as I did, gently prying into the two long slots to wedge it loose -see photo below)

2) insert the 68000 into the MonSTer board, taking care of the direction (there's a 45 degree corner on the CPU chip which should match the socket -see photo below)

3) insert the MonSTer board's white socket carefully into the (now empty) CPU socket inside the MegaSTe. Take care to ensure the orientation is correct!

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That's how far I got today, so I powered on the computer and it booted up! No smoke or other irregularities, so I must have done something right

But I'm a little puzzled, because according to what I've read here I should enable the FLASHON jumper in order to use the original TOS ROMs (or was it the other way round?). In any case there are no jumpers at all on my MonSTer board, and I can't seem to locate that particular one either (perhaps it's one of those unmarked jumpers?).

So next is the DMA interrupt cable which came with the board. Looking up where pin 10 of the ACSI connector was I used a multimeter to see if there was somewhere on the motherboard I could attach the wire and I found it to be at the end of R419 (see photo). When it's all been tested I'll solder a wire here for a more permanent, failsafe connection.

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The other end of the DMA interrupt request cable goes somewhere on the MonSTer board, but where? To me it seems it's one of the two pins marked ACSI (both pins work -why are there two by the way?):

20170308-134306_IMG_1219-Edit.jpg

So does it all look good so far?

[alanh]

You've got ACSI pin 10 wrong. It's the other side.

There are two ACSI pins on the MonSTer for daisy chaining other hardware that needs interrupts, saving them having to connect to pin 10 on the ACSI port as well.

[Fujiyama]

Thanks for pointing that out. Your findings are confirmed here as well.

So I traced the DMA interrupt signal to one side of R525 (looking for a suitable place to attach the wire-clip):

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[vattari]

I was able to use the header pins in the internal DMA port since I didn't have a SCSI controller.
Are you able to remove the controller, connect to the header with a parrot clip that lies parallel to the board and replaced the controller? I did a similar thing in a Mega ST with a monster board and an internal connector for CosmosEx

[Fujiyama]

I located the signal there as well (looking at the MegaSTe schematics helped), but my MegaSTe does have an SCSI controller which I don't want to remove, so it'll be a hassle to connect it there.
R525 as I pointed out in my previous posting should do the same job, shouldn't it?

I've just dug out an IDE-dual CF adapter and a short 44-pin female-female IDE cable. As usual it doesn't come with any documentation so I'll have to experiment to see which card slot to use etc. Also the 44 pin connector doesn't go all the way in as it's partly obstructed by the PCB on one side. I might have to shave some of that PCB off so as to not have it pop off, but for now I'm assuming contact is made to all pins.

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Regarding the MonSTer and recognizing/using the CF card: that's just a matter of booting up with HDdriver on a floppy, recognizing and formatting the CF card, then installing the driver onto the CF card so I can boot from there, right?
The other software is just for configuring the Flash ROM and extra memory, isn't it? I'll get to that later, one step at a time.

[spiny]

>Regarding the MonSTer and recognizing/using the CF card: that's just a matter of booting up with HDdriver on a floppy, recognizing and formatting the CF card, then installing the driver onto the CF card so I can boot from there, right?

in a word, yes you need tos2.06 to autoboot IDE, but you should already have this.

[Fujiyama]

Yup, got 2.06.

I've been able to get the CF card to appear in HDdriver, but I must be doing something wrong since I can't install the driver on to the CF card as a boot disk. I'm using version 8.21 -do I need a later version to get this to work?

If I run HDDRUTIL and select Tools-Device check I get this:

Bus 0: Atari ACSI
Bus 1: Atari IDE
00.00: $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ Direct access
01.00: Sandisk SDCFJ-256 HDX Direct access

I'm able to "Initialize partition" in HDdriver, but "Partition" gives me the message "couldn't determine the medium's capacity". I believe I should stay away from "Format" though when using CF/SD cards as that would wear it out in no time, or so I seem to remember hearing.
I'm also unable to install the driver on to the CF drive (if I click on File-Install HDdriver I'm just presented with a new window containing nothing).
And on the TOS 2.06 desktop I go to Desktop-Install devices which gives me two new drive icons (C and D), but if I double-click them nothing happens. I've also tried partitioning/erasing the CF card on my Mac to see if that made any difference, choosing MSDOS but it didn't make any difference.

[alanh]

First off, it looks like the CF card is plugged into the secondary slot as it's appeared at 01.00. You should move it to the primary as you only have one card.

Secondly, to boot, you need to make sure it's partitioned as "TOS ONLY" in HDDRUTIL.

[Fujiyama]

the IDE-CF adapter is plugged into the primary IDE slot on the MonSTer board (see photo a couple of comments back)
There are two jumper settings on the IDE-CF adapter:

A: slave/master
B: master/slave

I don't know exactly what that means, but I believe it swaps the two CF slots to be master or slave. It's currently set to A (slave/master)
I got two bombs when I moved the jumper, but when I moved the jumper and the CF card it worked just like before. I still haven't been able to install the driver or get it to work any more though.
I don't think I got the "$ $ $ $ $ $" when I first tried all of this out today, and I'm not sure when it appeared as I've tried so many different things. Could it be a reference to the empty CF slot in my dual IDE-CF adapter?
I'm unable to partition the Sandisk card (bus 01.00) as it doesn't even show up in the partition menu. Strangely bus 00.00 ($ $ $ $ $ $) does show up, but as mentioned earlier it won't let me parition in the end because it can't determine its size. That would make sense if there's no CF card to be found.

I think I'm going to look for my old, seldomly used USB floppy disk drive to plug into my Mac so I can transfer the latest HDdriver demo over to the Atari and see if that makes a difference.

[alanh]

I didn't mean on the MonSTer board, I meant your IDE-CF card.

If you get two bombs, then it's likely something is on the card that the MegaSTE is trying to boot from, and crashing. Hold the ALT key down to avoid booting from the device which would allow the MegaSTE to see it at 00:00. Which would be correct, as you only have one CF card plugged in.

You shouldn't configure IDE with only a slave, bad things can happen and exactly why you are seeing problems.

[Fujiyama]

Perhaps the IDE-CF card is causing all the problems.
I was expecting two IDE connectors on it, so I don't understand how two cards on two buses should be accessed with it.
I'll try out your suggestions later. I'll also see about inserting another CF card into it, so as to populate both slots.
In the end I might have to buy a single card adapter instead -perhaps an SD type as others here have been using.

[alanh]

Read up on IDE. There is a primary and slave device. It's always been that way. If you use a single card adapter, it's usually primary/slave selectable with a jumper anyway. The CF card works in the same way.

[piku]

Is my memory wrong that you need at least version 9.x for CF cards in certain situations? I don't recall having this working well util I moved to HD Driver 10

[alanh]

A newer version certainly would help. You can even try the demo versions to double check.

[joska]

Perhaps the IDE-CF card is causing all the problems.

I'm quite sure it isn't. However, your CF-card could cause problems. Try a real IDE device instead.

[Fujiyama]

That's good advice, Joska.
I've attached a 2.5" IDE drive from an old Mac laptop which is recognized by the Atari as IDE 0.0, but with "no partitions" when HDdriver boots up from the floppy. This happens with both the latest demo version and my 8.21 full version. I'm now in the midst of reformatting the drive and will see what comes out of that. From the looks of it this is something that will take all night (it's an 80 GB drive).

You're right, Alanh, about IDE devices. I'm getting a little rusty
I was confusing IDE buses and master/slave and suppose the dual CF adapter I have is just wired for one master and one slave device. It's strange that it doesn't work properly though. IIRC you shouldn't format memory cards or they'll quickly lose a few lives. Will partitioning alone do?

[alanh]

You don't need to format anything these days as long as you trust the device. IDE doesn't need formatting. All that does these days is map where bad sectors are.

[joska]

No need to format IDE devices. Just partition it. It is normal that HD Driver does not find any partitions on a Mac partitioned drive...

[Fujiyama]

That's what I initially thought as well, but "no partitions" while booting (right after HDdriver reports finding the drive as an IDE device on 0.00) happens even after having partitioned it.

In HDdriver's partition menu I've chosen "TOS" for each partition and with various small sizes (the first entry being at 15 MB as I believe there's a 16 MB limit on the boot drive in TOS). Being such a large drive I haven't used up all the space. I also tried only creating a single, small TOS partition (2 MB or whatever). Made no difference...

UPDATE: I tried attaching the IDE-CF adapter again, this time with two CF cards inserted. I was able to partition them both, and a "C" drive is now recognized when booting up. However, when I'm unable to create a desktop icon and access it. I made sure it was a TOS partition (taking care to type TOS in capitals -I've written it in lower case in the past, so that might have been the reason it didn't come up).
So some progress, but still no dice.

[alanh]

You don't type "TOS" in capitals. For a TOS partition you don't type anything at all.

[wongck]

You can try BGM for TOS partition, and you should be able use till 256MB from TOS 1.02 onwards.
(even more depending on your TOS)
But you are right to test boot partition of 16MB.

[Fujiyama]

I now have two CF-card partitions ("C" at 15MB and "D" at 100MB) on my TOS desktop!
I used CBHD to partition it, so I don't know what's going on with HDdriver. If I boot with CBHD in the AUTO folder from a floppy both CF-partitions appear on the TOS desktop and all's well, but if I put HDdriver in the AUTO folder and boot they don't show up at all.

Also, I'm unable to boot from the CF-card despite having installed the driver from CBHDCONF.APP. The DMA interrupt cable is attached to pin 10 of the ACSI port and I believe I'm booting into TOS 2.06 (I say "believe" because I just realized that I don't have an English TOS installed in my MegaSTe ROMs, so it must be booting from the Flash ROM which obviously is pre-installed with TOS. I don't remember how to identify TOS versions, but desktop info shows it to be (c)1985-1991.

It would be interesting to see what happens if I boot it from the pre-installed ROMs, but I can't figure out the jumpers. They're not as described earlier in this thread nor the MonSTer readme. Here's a photo (click to enlarge) of my MegaSTe version of the MonSTer where I assume the double-row is for the jumpers while the other one is for attaching stuff (like the Blitter chip):

megaSTe_jumpers.jpg

I've obviously found the DMA interrupt pins as discussed earlier (they're the two bottom/rightmost ones marked "ACSI"), but where's FLASHON for selecting the built-in ROM chips?

[troed]

I believe I'm booting into TOS 2.06 (I say "believe" because I just realized that I don't have an English TOS installed in my MegaSTe ROMs, so it must be booting from the Flash ROM which obviously is pre-installed with TOS. I don't remember how to identify TOS versions, but desktop info shows it to be (c)1985-1991.

If you have a fuji logo at the top left you're booting TOS 2.06. Else you're booting some other version.

/Troed

[alanh]

JBLOCK is documented in the README.

[troed]

I can't figure out the jumpers. They're not as described earlier in this thread nor the MonSTer readme.[..] but where's FLASHON for selecting the built-in ROM chips?

Code: Select all

SIDE JBLOCK....

 	TOSSEL	FLASHSW	FLASHON	IDESW	SDA	SCL
        TOSSEL  FLASHSW FLASHON IDESW   GND     3.3V

You can clearly see the label jblock in your image, so, counting from left the first jumper is TOSSEL, the second FLASHSW and the third is FLASHON.