XEL-CF Compact Flash Adapter for 1088XEL (formerly XEL-I3)

[Mr Robot]

I removed the dual slot reader and went back to a single slot. Now I don't have the frustration of it not working  

[flashjazzcat]

I have a dual slot adapter and two cards which work perfectly in tandem, but in practice slot 2 is always empty and 'Slave' is disabled in the firmware settings.

[tooloudtoowide]

these are the types I have and they work in Incognito, SIDE2, as Amiga HDD etc. but Fdisk and my CF3 are not working with them

 

 

[+mytek]

12 hours ago, tooloudtoowide said:

these are the types I have and they work in Incognito, SIDE2, as Amiga HDD etc. but Fdisk and my CF3 are not working with them

 

 

Those work fine in both the XEL and XLD systems I have, and I've actually noticed that some others that also work, don't in the SIDE2. I think I have about a half a dozen different brands and several choices of SanDisk cards that all work for me. Now I know that doesn't help you in the least, but it does suggest that perhaps there is something not quite right with your CF3 board. Are you using all 74F series chips?

 

Edit: Opps I thought both of those were the Sandisk cards I have, but that was only true for one of them when I checked my CF inventory. So here's what I do have...

 

 

The ones in the top two rows all work without issues, and can be hot plugged and then refreshed, coming right back up. BTW, The silver & red SanDisks are hard to see so here's their specs: 4GB @ 25MB/s, 16GB @ 50MB/s. The 16GB @ 50MB/s can be cranky about being hot plugged with the XEL-CF3, but on the XLD no problem (the XLD has additional address buffering). The ones on the bottom left are cranky about being hot plugged and then refreshed, they don't always get seen. But if I try repeatably to plug them in and then do a refresh they eventually fall in line and get refreshed properly. The ones on the bottom right don't ever work after being hot plugged.

 

All of these cards work from the Loader if they are in the drive when powered up. The ones in the bottom row don't always work when partitioned and formatted for use under SDX. The ones above do work correctly in this regard. And only the top 2 rows work in my SIDE2, hence the reason everyone says that SanDisk is the way to go.

 

 

Edited December 12, 2019 by mytek
My initial statement wasn't entirely correct

[flashjazzcat]

8 hours ago, mytek said:

And only the top 2 rows work in my SIDE2, hence the reason everyone says that SanDisk is the way to go.

And since only the top 2 rows appear to work without issue with XEL-CF (surviving hot-swapping, etc), SanDisk appears to be the way to go with XEL-CF as well. Interesting that the Canon card works well too: I used to have one somewhere, but I forget where I put it now.

[+mytek]

4 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

And since only the top 2 rows appear to work without issue with XEL-CF (surviving hot-swapping, etc), SanDisk appears to be the way to go with XEL-CF as well.

Yes to be safe, and to have full functionality those would be the cards to use. However I think it's note worthy that the others appear to work reliably in the Loader, just not as partitioned DOS disks. Thus if restricted to that use alone, they are still considered good in my book for either the XEL-CF3 or the XLD, just not the SIDE2. In fact that is exactly how I do use them, filling them with XEX games and such. And of course no hot swapping of those is allowed.

 

Quote

Interesting that the Canon card works well too: I used to have one somewhere, but I forget where I put it now.

The one I showed comes up as a SanDisk in disguise.

 

[tooloudtoowide]

14 hours ago, mytek said:

The ones in the top two rows all work without issues, and can be hot plugged and then refreshed, coming right back up.

 

 

Same two of the Sandisk cards are in my hands. 4GB Sandisk I have in ACA500plus so I will take it out of it to try. But I have like four 16GB Ultra 30MB/s like the one in 2nd row and they are not working at all. How you format/partition them? I'm on MacOS, but I have spare PC laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate around.

[tooloudtoowide]

15 hours ago, mytek said:

Are you using all 74F series chips?

 

 

got it already build, but looks like all chips are 74F. 

[+mytek]

1 hour ago, tooloudtoowide said:

Same two of the Sandisk cards are in my hands. 4GB Sandisk I have in ACA500plus so I will take it out of it to try. But I have like four 16GB Ultra 30MB/s like the one in 2nd row and they are not working at all. How you format/partition them? I'm on MacOS, but I have spare PC laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate around.

I just formatted them as standard FAT32 on my Linux Mint box.

 

21 minutes ago, tooloudtoowide said:

got it already build, but looks like all chips are 74F. 

I specified Texas Instruments devices in the original BOM. Not sure if that would make a difference, but sometimes the propagation delays differ slightly between manufacturers. Might be worth a try to swap out your chips for TI ones.

 

 

[flashjazzcat]

2 hours ago, mytek said:

However I think it's note worthy that the others appear to work reliably in the Loader, just not as partitioned DOS disks.

Well, the loader is read-only, so you can possibly get away with flaky cards, although the ironic thing is that the loader does nothing to try and account for transmission errors, while the PBI BIOS does. I've grown extremely distrustful of media which 'seems to work' in one situation and not the other, especially after running around in circles for months on end trying to make sense of the unpredictable behaviour of certain media. The only fault I managed to find a solution to (or at least a reason for) was the issue of MicroDrives not working. It turned out that they (certainly the example I have here, at least) are knocked out of 8-bit PIO mode as soon as the IDE status register is read while DRQ is asserted. Since the PBI BIOS reads the status register once for every sixteen bytes transferred (assuming a 512 byte logical sector) in order to check whether DRQ is deasserted at the appropriate time when the transfer is complete, this is why the thing didn't work. Removing the DRQ check fixed the issue, but since MicroDrives are comparatively rare and transmission errors common by comparison, the DRQ check stayed.

Edited December 12, 2019 by flashjazzcat

[madness77]

21 hours ago, mytek said:

 

I specified Texas Instruments devices in the original BOM. Not sure if that would make a difference, but sometimes the propagation delays differ slightly between manufacturers. Might be worth a try to swap out your chips for TI ones.

 

Indeed, it seems that the TI chips are a little bit better:

[+mytek]

20 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

Well, the loader is read-only, so you can possibly get away with flaky cards, although the ironic thing is that the loader does nothing to try and account for transmission errors, while the PBI BIOS does. I've grown extremely distrustful of media which 'seems to work' in one situation and not the other, especially after running around in circles for months on end trying to make sense of the unpredictable behaviour of certain media.

Yes but what better way to use a CF card that isn't trustworthy, then to use it for those read-only applications such as games and demos. Worst case scenario is that the application doesn't always load 100% of the time, and might require a re-try occasionally, although that later part has not been my experience .

 

5 minutes ago, madness77 said:

Indeed, it seems that the TI chips are a little bit better:

So my hunch may be correct. Thanks for posted that information.

 

[bfollowell]

I haven't started my XEL project yet. I bought my CF3 kit from MacRorie at Brewing Academy. This makes me think that I should look at my kit and see if it came with TI chips or not. For that matter, I don't recall any certain brand of chips being called out in the BOM for my 1088XEL. Are there any chips where a certain brand is recommended?

 

Edited December 13, 2019 by bfollowell

[+MacRorie]

1 hour ago, bfollowell said:

I haven't started my XEL project yet. I bought my CF3 kit from MacRorie at Brewing Academy. This makes me think that I should look at my kit and see if it came with TI chips or not. For that matter, I don't recall any certain brand of chips being called out in the BOM for my 1088XEL. Are there any chips where a certain brand is recommended?

 

All of the CF3s we sell have been tested on dual and single CF setups and never had any problems.  They all have genuine TI chips.

 

Ours also use resistor networks where called for and not single resistors.

[bfollowell]

56 minutes ago, MacRorie said:

All of the CF3s we sell have been tested on dual and single CF setups and never had any problems.  They all have genuine TI chips.

 

Ours also use resistor networks where called for and not single resistors.

OK, so now I don't have to check. Thanks! Good to know.

 

I can't wait to get started on my 1088 in a month or so!

 

[flashjazzcat]

4 hours ago, mytek said:

Yes but what better way to use a CF card that isn't trustworthy

I just retire them completely; I have only four or five 'trustworthy' CF cards here and of those I only use the two SanDisk 4GB cards on a regular basis. I figure I can't fit more than two cards in any one machine at one time, and I can't use more than one machine simultaneously, so I don't feel the need to press into service cards which aren't fully functional. Of course I may be biased owing to the fact I wrote the U1MB firmware: that one time out of a hundred that the application or game doesn't load is one time too many when I am attempting to ensure there are no firmware bugs.

[+mytek]

On 12/13/2019 at 7:24 AM, bfollowell said:

I haven't started my XEL project yet. I bought my CF3 kit from MacRorie at Brewing Academy. This makes me think that I should look at my kit and see if it came with TI chips or not. For that matter, I don't recall any certain brand of chips being called out in the BOM for my 1088XEL. Are there any chips where a certain brand is recommended?

The Digi-Key part number and links in the BOM point to TI parts. So if you order according to what is spec'ed in the BOM you'll get the correct chips. But you are right that the BOM doesn't explicitly call for TI parts to be used. It's just implied by the vendor part number provided.

 

But to be clear, I don't know if that is the problem with tooloudtoowide's XEL-CF3.

 

[+mytek]

7 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

I just retire them completely; I have only four or five 'trustworthy' CF cards here and of those I only use the two SanDisk 4GB cards on a regular basis. I figure I can't fit more than two cards in any one machine at one time, and I can't use more than one machine simultaneously, so I don't feel the need to press into service cards which aren't fully functional. Of course I may be biased owing to the fact I wrote the U1MB firmware: that one time out of a hundred that the application or game doesn't load is one time too many when I am attempting to ensure there are no firmware bugs.

I have lot's of variations in CF cards due to the early days of experimentation when creating the XEL-CFx series boards. Even the ones that didn't work at first were handy to have around as I kept tweaking the design, since I knew I was going in the right direction when a CF card that flat out wouldn't work before, suddenly started to respond. The more and better that response got, was how I knew things were going down the right track. Sometimes to know if you have hit the sweet spot, you need something that is on edge to test with.

 

After all the R&D was done, I still had those extra cards laying around. At this point they are actually very reliable so long as I observe their idiosyncrasies. Some are rather interesting in their behaviour, where I can use FDISK to create several partitions, then format them all, and copy some files over from SIO2PC without a glitch. I can even copy from partition to partition without errors. And I can keep on doing this so long as I don't power down the machine. However when I power it back up and try the same thing it's like the partitions no longer exist. However that same CF if just used as a FAT32 for the Loader never seems to have a problem. And one of the brands (I forget which one) will successfully let me use it as a partitioned drive under SDX no problem, and continue to do so when powered up and down. However if I try to setup and use the FAT32 partition along side the SDX partitions, those get destroyed. I've tried this multiple times without success on that particular brand of CF, whereas no problem on something like the SanDisk. So you would think that if a certain CF isn't going to work correctly, that it would error out randomly, which doesn't always seem to be the case.

 

Anyway I'll keep on using all my CFs, and just reserve the SanDisks for where the extra stability is needed .

 

[flashjazzcat]

7 hours ago, mytek said:

So you would think that if a certain CF isn't going to work correctly, that it would error out randomly, which doesn't always seem to be the case.

I remember all the experimentation only too well, as I remember changes to the card initialisation code, etc, being a total waste of time. My attitude now is that a card either works fully or it doesn't. The only idiosyncrasy I'm interested in now is reliable operation.

[+mytek]

Point, counter point, point, counter point. I'm done  .

 

[madness77]

On 12/12/2019 at 6:23 PM, tooloudtoowide said:

got it already build, but looks like all chips are 74F. 

 

@tooloudtoowide I ordered a batch of TI chips, so if you want to swap them, send me a private message. I'm from Warsaw too. 

[tooloudtoowide]

@mytek I confirm, swapping ICs to TI ones as in boom fixed the problem, I see now 16GB Sandisk cards that were not visible before. Thankx, will share this on atari.org.pl forum in 1088XEL in topic. Thanx to @madness77 - got ICs from him without waiting for delivery from Mouser etc.

 

So I can enjoy fully my 1088XEL while printing the rest of case for it. Thank you folks for help!

[BigBen]

For some time now I have been the owner of a 1088XEL, a real class of hardware including software, and have carried out several tests. I have two problems:

In the basic position, joystick input 2 does not have the value "15" but "12". No matter what position the switch on the Mouse Port Select is in. Has the wrong software been installed and how can I check the version? I have a Galep 5 programmer, to rewrite the Pic is not a problem.

 

To be able to use a cartridge at all I have to set "8k Cart Rom: Enabled" in the bios. Unfortunately the BIOS accesses $ D500 when booting and switches off my cartridge type "Megacart". In addition, a homemade cartridge does not run on it. Is it possible to add this entry for example: Cartridge Port Type: 8k Bios access, 16k without Bios access.

 

I bought the board second hand.

 

Thanks,
Bernd

[flashjazzcat]

9 minutes ago, BigBen said:

Unfortunately the BIOS accesses $ D500 when booting and switches off my cartridge type "Megacart".

The PBI BIOS accesses RAM under the cartridge control area, and if these writes happen to pass through to cartridge control space (which would be a rather unfortunate feature of the U1MB CPLD design and entirely out of my hands), you'll have to disable the HDD or the entire PBI BIOS to use the cartridge.

[+mytek]

4 hours ago, tooloudtoowide said:

@mytek I confirm, swapping ICs to TI ones as in boom fixed the problem, I see now 16GB Sandisk cards that were not visible before. Thankx, will share this on atari.org.pl forum in 1088XEL in topic. Thanx to @madness77 - got ICs from him without waiting for delivery from Mouser etc.

 

So I can enjoy fully my 1088XEL while printing the rest of case for it. Thank you folks for help!

I'm glad to hear that worked for you . And although I always suspected there might be problems switching brands on those chips, it's cool to get a confirmation of that. The timing is just so very critical that it doesn't take much to skew the results, and end up with a CF drive that's on the edge of working or no working with certain cards.

 

35 minutes ago, BigBen said:

In the basic position, joystick input 2 does not have the value "15" but "12". No matter what position the switch on the Mouse Port Select is in. Has the wrong software been installed and how can I check the version? I have a Galep 5 programmer, to rewrite the Pic is not a problem.

The mouse chip would likely not cause the problem you are seeing, since it only converts the PS/2 mouse into a quadrature encoded 'ST' like mouse, and then feeds it to the appropriate joystick port dependent upon the switch position. Just to be sure, pull the mouse chip out and see if your joystick is still giving you the wrong reading. If it still does, then it sounds more like the ribbon cable between the 1088XEL board and the joystick connector might be off by one pin position.

 

Edit: There has only ever been one version of the Mousetari code released as far as I recall. And although its still considered a BETA version, seems to be pretty solid. But you bring up a good point about knowing the version, something I'll have to take into consideration when, and if I ever update it. The TK-II keyboard chip however has a simple way to check version. Just press ALT+F1 and it will type the version on screen.