IDE Card Group Buy ?

[Shift838]

I started building one of the cards today.  got most of it done.  Almost ready to try it!

 

 

[aftyde]

If not too late - definitely interested in two built cards.  Being able to retire my single WDS SCSI card would be nice... 

[Shift838]

7 hours ago, aftyde said:

If not too late - definitely interested in two built cards.  Being able to retire my single WDS SCSI card would be nice... 

signup HERE

 

No orders have been made as of yet.  I'm doing a test build to make sure I can still do it with my old eyes.  doing a few surface mount chips like on my desings for things are easy, but this card is 99% surface mount.  Plus I am seeing if the new SMD clock chip I have chosen will work with my adapter board.  

Edited May 17, 2020 by Shift838

[Shift838]

So yesterday I finished up the build on the IDE card.

 

I triple-checked everything with my great magnification goggles, then over a light box and finally under a USB microscope.  I verified I did not have any solder bridges.  Everything looked great.  I used solder paste and my reflow workstation.

 

I set the CRU to 1000 and promptly installed the IDE card, with no IDE to CF card adapter yet, just to see if the system will recognize it.  Loaded up the ROS Configuration program and it sees it of course at >1000 as a Unknown Card, which is correct.  So far so good.  I then loaded up Fred's IDETEST program and initiated the test.  I see it go through test 1 through 5 without a hitch, but it hits the paging test and starts failing..  

 

as Doc would say DAMN! DAMN!

 

yanked the card and starting tracing and using my continuity tester and things were not testing for continuity when the solder joints were there.  hmmm..

 

So i mad a drastic decision. to desoldered all the chips and removed all the components.  I unsoldered everything and cleaned up all the board pads for all the chips.  I then spent most of the evening yesterday and part of the morning today resoldering the chips by hand. Placed the card back into the box and came ran the IDETEST again.  This time I only had 2 pages fail the page testing.   I can feel I'm close and I know it's the SRAM, i decided to swap the SRAM for a different manufacture.  (good thing I ordered 2 different ones!)

 

Installed the card back and powered the system up.  And nothing but a blank CYAN screen.  It's hung....  Fred found issues some years back with the clock chips setting an interrupt on power up and he found a solution.

 

"In some cases the TI99/4A system immediately looks like it is crashed when powered up with the IDE-CARD in the peripheral expansion box and no DSR is loaded yet. I found out that the clock chip can generate interrupts when the peripheral expansion box is switched on. To prevent this from happening and to be able to load the DSR, the interrupt pin of the clock chip must be left outside of the IC-socket. For the BQ4847 clock chip this will be pin #5 and for the BQ4852 clock chip this will be pin #34. After the DSR is loaded successfully the interrupt pin can be placed back but this is not necessary."

 

Since the clock chip I chose (BQ4802-YDW) is compatible with the BQ4847 clock chip, I decided to sever pin #5 for the Interrupt as Fred found before.  Now I booted to the Title screen!  I'm excited now and I'm sure you are too!

 

I loaded up the IDETEST program and everything passed!  

 

Now i'm really excited...  I run the Fred's IDE DSR Load program from the FG99 cartridge and successfully load the DSR!

 

I then run Fred's DU2k to show the IDE devices and they all show up!

 

I create a partition table for 260mb IDE1 via the DU2k and proceed to Initialize the IDE device.

 

SUCCESS!

 

I go into DM2k and I can see IDE1 and successfully create a directory..

 

time to do more extensive testing.  copying, creating, accessing.. etc...

 

Finished build:

 

 

[+InsaneMultitasker]

Nice. If you turn the switch the OFF position is he interrupt inhibited?  If not, might be valuable to add a jumper block or similar to that pin to minimize removing the card if this happens. 

[+mizapf]

46 minutes ago, Shift838 said:

"I found out that the clock chip can generate interrupts when the peripheral expansion box is switched on. To prevent this from happening and to be able to load the DSR, the interrupt pin of the clock chip must be left outside of the IC-socket. For the BQ4847 clock chip this will be pin #5 and for the BQ4852 clock chip this will be pin #34. After the DSR is loaded successfully the interrupt pin can be placed back but this is not necessary."

 

As I recently reported, I had to write new emulations for the BQ chips when I rewrote the IDE adapter card in MAME. In that context I also read about this interrupt issue, but for the emulation I decided not to care about that. Why? - Because nothing is running when you turn off the emulation, in particular no interrupt can happen when MAME is not running. ?

 

(I do believe this is an issue for the real hardware, though.)

[Shift838]

52 minutes ago, InsaneMultitasker said:

Nice. If you turn the switch the OFF position is he interrupt inhibited?  If not, might be valuable to add a jumper block or similar to that pin to minimize removing the card if this happens. 

i have already put a jumper block on the final design of my RTC Adapter board.  Of course the prototypes did not have it, so I had to cut a trace and add one.

[Shift838]

I have found a issue.  If I create a directory less than 4 characters it shows up correctly, but anything 4 or more characters the name changes.  For instance “TEST” becomes “TESD”.   Not sure why yet.  
 

 

[Shift838]

I decided to reflow every chip with my reflow heat workstation.

 

Now I am able to see all 4 partitions I created within DU2K

 

I was able to Initialize the partitions and see them in DM2k.

 

I then tried to create directories to see if the solder reflow solved the issue with the directory names changing if >3 characters.  It did.  But.... whenever I created a directory I would get a error 0 in DM2K although the directory would create correctly.

 

I decided to pull my partition size down from the max to a bit smaller.  Now no errors.  I have tested copying, loading, saving all successful, but I want to do more testing.

 

All this is using Fred's latest DSR with the new BQ4802 clock chip.

 

Also verified DSR headers show correctly within DU2K:

 

 

I have tested all the CALL commands from Basic for Fred's DSR and all function correclty.

 

And some of Fred's utilities on my fresh IDE partition #1.

 

All my testing I am using a IDE to SD card adapter:

Edited May 19, 2020 by Shift838

[+9640News]

One thing I really appreciated that Matt did with the TIPI was to have mounting holes for the Raspberry PI on the PEB TIPI.  If the SD-IDE adapter you have is very popular, you might want to consider having holes in the IDE board that would allow you to mount the board to the card.

 

Just a suggestion, unless changing the line length between connections is problematic or there if the layout of the chips do not permit.

 

As I said, just a suggestion.

 

Beery

 

[Shift838]

that would require a complete new design of the board.  This is the original board that came out back in 2004.

 

The amount of traces currently on this board is huge.  If it was redesigned we could probably do it by only allowing one type of clock chip.  I would also put in a molex type connector to be able to power the IDE2SD adapter.  Definitely something to think about.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Shift838

[+9640News]

With a redesign, then forget my idea. 

[Shift838]

I powered the TI off and let it set overnight for 12 hours and came back and all the DATA i saved to IDE drives are still there!  However the clock was not correct any longer.  typically the IDE clock will display the time date in the below format:

 

HH:MM:SS   DAY of Week  MM-DD-YYYY

 

This morning it was odd.

 

I had 08:C8:33 for the time something similar for the date.  so I need to figure out why that's going on.

[+9640News]

30 minutes ago, Shift838 said:

I powered the TI off and let it set overnight for 12 hours and came back and all the DATA i saved to IDE drives are still there!  However the clock was not correct any longer.  typically the IDE clock will display the time date in the below format:

 

HH:MM:SS   DAY of Week  MM-DD-YYYY

 

This morning it was odd.

 

I had 08:C8:33 for the time something similar for the date.  so I need to figure out why that's going on.

 

Was it 8 am for the hour for the time?  How about reading the time again and comparing to with what it should have been?  Perhaps a short between a couple of the clock pins for the output?

 

Have you confirmed some of the data on the drives was good by loading a program or reviewing a text file, etc?

 

Just thoughts......

 

Beery

 

[Shift838]

23 minutes ago, BeeryMiller said:

 

Was it 8 am for the hour for the time?  How about reading the time again and comparing to with what it should have been?  Perhaps a short between a couple of the clock pins for the output?

 

Have you confirmed some of the data on the drives was good by loading a program or reviewing a text file, etc?

 

Just thoughts......

 

Beery

 

turned off the ti at the 8:50 am and just fired it back up.

 

I should see 09:54:00  WE 05-19-2020, but what I see is:

 

09:D3:93  P 85-A0-20A0

 

I can load and run programs off of the IDE drives.

 

time to yank the clock module and reflow some pins..

 

 

[MikeV]

On 5/20/2020 at 10:57 AM, Shift838 said:

turned off the ti at the 8:50 am and just fired it back up.

 

I should see 09:54:00  WE 05-19-2020, but what I see is:

 

09:D3:93  P 85-A0-20A0

 

I can load and run programs off of the IDE drives.

 

time to yank the clock module and reflow some pins..

 

 

This is turning into a very real "adventure"! Thanks for the perseverance.

[+mizapf]

Does anyone have an IDE card with a BQ4847 on it? Fred and I recently found a possible glitch in the IDELOAD program of his IDEDSR, where he did not correctly set the UTI flag in the flag register when setting the time. This led to a failed detection of the BQ4847 in MAME.

 

Unfortunately, the specs of the BQ4847 seem to be lost; there is no complete document anywhere, and all information we could find is from Thierry's page. The BQ4802 seems similar to the BQ4847, but it explicitly requires proper setting of the UTI flag.

 

(The UTI flag means "Update Transfer Inhibit", which freezes the registers. Other clock chips typically require to freeze, then update, then activate again to transfer the settings into the internal clock.)

[Flottmann1]

here my IDE Card

 

[+Ksarul]

Every reference for the BQ4847 I've seen refers you back to the BQ4845 datasheet for the detailed functional description. The BQ4847 datasheet only gives a general description and shows the things that are different.

bq4845 RTC Datasheet.pdf

Edited May 26, 2020 by Ksarul

[+mizapf]

@Flottmann1Did you try to run Fred's IDELOAD? Does it detect the BQ4847, or does it say "No clock chip detected - assuming BQ4847"?

@KsarulThat's good ... much better than the BQ4847 datasheets that I saw, referring to "Figure 2" which is not included.

[+Schmitzi]

7 minutes ago, mizapf said:

@Flottmann1Did you try to run Fred's IDELOAD? Does it detect the BQ4847, or does it say "No clock chip detected - assuming BQ4847"?

@KsarulThat's good ... much better than the BQ4847 datasheets that I saw, referring to "Figure 2" which is not included.

 

My one says:

 

 

 

Edited May 26, 2020 by Schmitzi

[+Schmitzi]

 

Some weeks ago, when I had problems, I also tried the clock on the red foam here,

but it did not work. Then, some days later, my card worked again, with the original chip.

strange

 

[Flottmann1]

after IDELOAD  I have this  Screen

 

but if I want to set the Time i get an Error Message

 

 

[Flottmann1]

a short Video

 

 

Edited May 26, 2020 by Flottmann1

[+mizapf]

Is this an older IDELOAD? I am using V12 (06/12/2019), and its menu shows as last item "Set IDE clock".