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Time to go write some code to handle the new reset I/O and POR output, then this one will go to steve3000 for testing. I have my computers ready and waiting :) Clearly Acorn changed the ROM wiring between the A310 and A3000, will the board work with the standard RO3 ROM carrier board in the A310, a...

I also have the Acorn RAM test ROMs, which offer a fairly rigorous cyclic RAM test... They never found an issue with the A3000 RAM, which showed up errors via large file copying. The file copying was the first think I could think of to check the RAM, I'd hope there are better options. Anyone fancy ...

As for the A5000, I'd be happy to volunteer...great excuse to find my A3020 in the loft!

I also have the Acorn RAM test ROMs, which offer a fairly rigorous cyclic RAM test...

Oh, exciting!

I'd happy to volunteer and have an 8mb A5000 so can test with/without the 8mb upgrade fitted.

I also have an old 'prototype' 1mb A5000 in the loft, but suspect your design requires 2mb on-board...or does it replace the on-board RAM completely?

IanS wrote: ↑

Mon Sep 02, 2019 9:30 pm

CDVDBurn - http://www.hubersn-software.com/cdvdburn.html Looks like it's still available. (I've never used it)

Oh yes, indeed...!

In which case, I suspect there's someone on here, significantly more qualified than my 20+ year faded memory, who can advise on this topic then

I have confirmed that my CD-ROM drive is a read only. I do have 2 or possibly as many as 4 CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives. I'm wondering about success of these working on the A7000+ What are people's experiences with this? Thanks again in advance...... I have no experience of DVD readers or writers on RI...

I did get a reply from Nick when I asked him about registering. He basically said it wasn't necessary to register now. The software gives a shareware warning when loaded, but is fully functional. That's good to hear. Although I've not looked at how it performs yet, or what features it offers, but i...

Depends on the size of your HD. In the good old times of HDs with less than 1 GiB I often used FCFS in compression mode to do a sector backup of my various drives and burned the image as the only file with CDBurn. This is much much faster than a file-by-file copying or archiving. https://www.craig-...

...you also need to have enough space on your harddisc to create the Zip file.

Assuming your CD drive is a CD writer, and you have some suitable CD writer software - then what I've done in the past is use !SparkFS to create a Zip file, and copy the contents of harddisc into the Zip, then pop it onto the CD. My 1Gb drive used to compress nicely to about 600mb, and fit on a CD (...

One other question..... What is the command/procedure to ensure a drive is bootable. That's *Opt 4,2 ...but you can see that this has already been done, as the HD catalogue reports option as "run". Have you successfully *RMREinit'd all the unplugged modules now? If so, try: *configure filesystem AD...

As above - I suspect your configuration settings in CMOS RAM have been corrupted. This can happen if you run an old (Arthur or RISC OS 2 era) game without using the 'Boot floppy' option in ADFFS.

Switching on with Delete held down, will reset CMOS RAM to default and should bring the desktop back.

Main intrigue is I have my adelaide board back, was going to pop it in and see if the machine could be coaxed back to life. Do you mean the Adelaide board was removed/desoldered from the PCB? That would have been a lot of work I'm sure... I was considering removing the Adelaide from my early A3010 ...

To avoid having live mains exposed I've been feeding an external 5V power supply onto PL2 & PL4. No need for +/-12V unless you are debugging sound or serial (don't think they are used for anything else. The A3010 has +/-12V from the power supply? I always thought it was 5V only like the A3000 (whic...

IanS wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 30, 2019 3:52 pm

It's amusing to me that the alternative keyboard connection has generated as much comment as the Econet module.

More information here: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=13291&p=173332#p173332

Pins 2-17 of the mini-podule socket are identical pin-for-pin with an Econet module, so no extra wiring. (Obviously the select signal on the mini-podule connector is for podule address space). It sort of makes sense if you look at the first machine with a mini-podule connector, the A3000, and look ...

...but back to the topic, that's an excellent piece of work, I'd never considered trying to get econet on the A3010. Other than tapping those lines from the ARM250, is there some additional rewiring going on behind the econet board in the picture? Or are most of the connections in the correct order ...

You need to change one jumper to use the alternative keyboard, you can't use both at once. You also can't use the built in mouse socket when the link is changed to alternative keyboard... so you need to plug your mouse into the external keyboard rather than into the back of the A3010 (or underneath...

The later ADFS interleaved both sides into a single logical disc.) ADFS can treat a whole disc as a single "volume" or "drive", but it doesn't interleave. The first 50% of sectors are on the lower side, with the second 50% of sectors on the upper side. Well ADFS did eventually interleave sides, but...

I think earlier model As (issue 1, 2, 3?) had the holes cut out as standard, only later issues had them covered.

The MEMC1a is required for the A310, in order to use the Acorn AKA30 SCSI podule, which was definitely RISC OS 2 compatible. But the MEMC1a doesn't itself add any SCSI functionality. The Cumana SCSI podule may have originally been RISC OS 2 compatible, but this one has been upgraded to a later versi...

There are a couple of undocumented features with bit 31 set in the Start, Initialise and Finalise Modules header fields: Bit 31 in Initialise indicates the Module is Squeezed and needs decompressing first Bit 31 in Finalise indicates the Module can't be *RMCleared Bits 31..28 in Start means it's a ...

If the ROM is looking for MessageTrans, then it's RISC OS 3 only.

RISC OS 2 provided Messages on disc, in !System.

...and yes, I don't recall CDFS being available on RO2.

Can you extract WindowManager from 2.01 and soft-load it (pre-desktop)? I have a vague recollection that the changes to support 8MB were in the Wimp. Maybe. Great idea as definitely seems WIMP is the problem. But I only need for a few tests, so for now, I'll live with 4mb :) Ok, I couldn't resist t...

steve3000 wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 14, 2019 11:13 pm

Have only tested on emulation so far, but it boots fine to the desktop with only 4mb showing, even if 8mb+ enabled.

...and just to confirm, the 4mb limited patch works fine on real hardware

richw wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 14, 2019 10:03 pm

Can you extract WindowManager from 2.01 and soft-load it (pre-desktop)?

I have a vague recollection that the changes to support 8MB were in the Wimp. Maybe.

Great idea as definitely seems WIMP is the problem. But I only need for a few tests, so for now, I'll live with 4mb

Thanks all, I've hacked away at RO2.00 and built a new version which ignores 8mb

Have only tested on emulation so far, but it boots fine to the desktop with only 4mb showing, even if 8mb+ enabled.

ROM attached here, along with brief details of hack.

For various reasons (mainly testing, games, etc), I'm building a multi-boot RISC OS system, including RISC OS 2.00. I'd like to get this working on an old Archimedes fitted with 8mb RAM, but hitting a problem. RISC OS 3 works fine with 8mb, RISC OS 2.01 also does, and Arthur 1.2 works fine also (but...

RobC wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 13, 2019 9:36 pm

looking at the outline spec, they only said this was preferable and could be an optional extra.

Although I've not read the spec, you could argue that MODE 0 was an optional extra, since it was not present on the Model A...?

I thought about whether streaming sampled sound would be possible back when I did my Bad Apple conversion, and although I didn't get round to writing any sound streaming code, I came to the conclusion that you would probably be able to do something interesting along these lines using a MMC/SD card i...