SuperVidel causing trouble in 060 mode

[mikro]

After a few months' hiatus I have managed to go back to my Falcon again. Basically I had the Falcon untouched, only transferred it from one place to another in a pretty safe bag.

To my surprise, even though it looked like working, it wasn't -- usually in the middle of a demo or clicking in COPS (XCONTROL clone) I'd get crashes, bus errors etc. The typical example was the WAIT demo, I could let it crash or reboot at the same moment reproducibly.

The interesting thing is that this behaviour could be observed even without any drivers and accessories. Just plain NVDI, which always worked in 060. So basically the SuperVidel made the Falcon crashing in 060 mode, assuming in a sort of old Videl register access.

I have verified this theory by removing the SuperVidel and yes, it helped.

Anyone has experienced something similar? I tried to mess with the J7 jumper but couldn't see any difference. Can't imagine what could have changed during the past 2-3 months since I have used it.

[mikro]

Guys, can you do me a favour? Try to download & run Wait 1.2 by TOYS: http://no-fragments.atari.org/no_fragme ... ait1_2.zip on your SuperVidel Falcon. Doesn't matter whether with the drivers or just plain VGA, the important thing is to have the SuperVidel fitted.

Ideally if you could observe not only whether the demo has finished to the end but also whether you can see the output on both screens -- for me I see only Videl (VGA) output, DVI is totally black. When testing this, make sure you have cloning enabled in your SV.INF, if you are starting the demo from a SV resolution.

Other demos (which work) like my TBL ports, various other 060 demos work all right *and* have both outputs visible / mirrored. The only exception is DONT by DHS and guess what, it stops after a while as well (music continues, same as with Wait).

I'll try to fit my other SuperVidel just to be sure. I really don't believe this kind of bug could have been present from the beginning (i.e. not working with some special (?) demos) but who knows. The test above should clear my doubts.

[jury]

You mean that the problem persists only when 2 monitors are running under clone option in sv.inf?
If so I will not be able to help currently as my second monitor died last summer and I still did not take it to repair.

[mikro]

No, the problem is there no matter what configuration but this is could be a nice visual hint -- for instance, if you do see the demo's output on both and I don't, it's clearly something wrong on my side. If you don't see DVI output and demo doesn't crash, it's still something wrong on my side. :)

So basically, even if you have only one monitor, you can do the following: run the demo, check DVI output (whether it's mirrored or not) and then switch back to VGA (to see whether demo continues to the end).

EDIT: just to be clear, to observe this (lack of) mirroring, you either have to run the demo without any SV drivers or with cloning enabled, naturally.

[jury]

I'm still not 100% sure that its what you need, so if anything wrong just let me know and I will do a retest. So what I did:
- started Falcon with Ctrl key ( no sv_bios.prg loaded ) on Falcon VGA output in TOS
- run the demo ( for like 20 seconds )
- switched video output to SV DVI
- let the demo run another 20-30 seconds
- switched video back to Falcon VGA
- let the demo run until going back to TOS

[mikro]

Jury: yes, that's basically the test I needed. If I didn't miss anything, it means that:

- demo successfully finishes
- demo is mirrored on both outputs

Both of the points do not happen on my setup. So that would seem to indicate that there is something wrong with my SuperVidel, damn it.

Thank you very much for your test anyway!

[evil]

Guys, can you do me a favour? Try to download & run Wait 1.2 by TOYS: http://no-fragments.atari.org/no_fragme ... ait1_2.zip on your SuperVidel Falcon. Doesn't matter whether with the drivers or just plain VGA, the important thing is to have the SuperVidel fitted.

Other demos (which work) like my TBL ports, various other 060 demos work all right *and* have both outputs visible / mirrored. The only exception is DONT by DHS and guess what, it stops after a while as well (music continues, same as with Wait).

Sorry a bit late to this. Both Wait and Don't Break the Oath works fine with 68060 and Supervidel here, from start to end.
To be extra sure I also tested DBTO from FreeMiNT with SuperVidel-resolution, ran fine and exited fine.

I used two monitors at the same time and the mirroring was flawless.


One thing I did noticed when the SV was still new, unzip would sometimes give CRC errors when depacking. I know marakaman had the same issue as we were talking about it at Sommarhack half a decade ago. I havn't experienced the problem lately though; perhaps it's due to new FreeMiNT versions or so. I'm not certain. Perhaps you suffer from the same thing and your depacked archives are faulty somehow? A long shot, but who knows.

[mikro]

Thanks for your test evil. The demo should be all right as it works on SV-less 060 setup but just to be totally sure I redownloaded it, couldn't spot any crc error.

I think the problem is that some signal on SV got loose and in some specific scenarios just writes some non-sense somewhere to RAM instead of a Videl register or something like that. I will know for sure after I put in the second SV.

[mikro]

We have an interesting development - Wait demo crashes on another CT60e + SuperVidel and in very similar manner, it is cured by flashing Insane's CT60 TOS 1.05. This can't be a coincidence, this is the boost I needed to investigate further -- clearly it's not a hardware fault and if it is, it's not specific to my CT60e.

If anyone has CT60e + SuperVidel, I urge you to try the demo for yourself. :)