Strange SIDE2 behavior

[TGB1718]

I have a SIDE3 that works fine with my U1M 130XE, I noticed that a program I wrote and wanted to test on real hardware

ran fine on my 800 with Incognito and my 130XE with U1M.

 

I have an unmodded 130XE it has my old SIDE2 on it and wanted to try it on that too, I was using PCLINK to copy the files

to my A8's, but it seems the CONFIG.SYS isn't being read, it looks like the default one in the CAR: device is being used, so

PCLINK is not being loaded, anyway I used my S-Drive to get the files and I tested my program on this 130XE and again it works fine.

 

I was I bit confused as to why the SIDE2 wasn't using the CONFIG.SYS so I put the SIDE2 in my U1M booted

and there are no hard drives showing and FDISK doesn't find the memory card.

 

I booted into U1M menu, selected Loader, I can see the memory card, the directories, but no files, if I then select

re-boot from the loader, I get to DOS and I can see the hard disk partitions and their contents, but again it's loading the

default CONFIG.SYS from the CAR: device. Re-boot again straight to SDX and no partitions available.

 

The SIDE2 has the latest BIOS, so does my U1M.

 

Any ideas, the SIDE2 was formatted originally on my U1M, so can't see why it's now not working as it used to.

[flashjazzcat]

1 hour ago, TGB1718 said:

I have an unmodded 130XE it has my old SIDE2 on it and wanted to try it on that too, I was using PCLINK to copy the files

to my A8's, but it seems the CONFIG.SYS isn't being read, it looks like the default one in the CAR: device is being used, so

PCLINK is not being loaded

 

1 hour ago, TGB1718 said:

I was I bit confused as to why the SIDE2 wasn't using the CONFIG.SYS so I put the SIDE2 in my U1M booted

and there are no hard drives showing and FDISK doesn't find the memory card.

I need to make this passage into a macro.

Quote

Unless you have U1MB, CONFIG.SYS cannot be read from the HDD because it's CONFIG.SYS on the CAR: device (in ROM) which loads the driver for the HDD. Chicken and egg situation.

You can:

• use the SDX Imaging Tool from DLT to edit the CONFIG.SYS on the SDX ROM and re-flash it to the cart
• load CONFIG.SYS from an SIO device on D1:, making sure it also loads SIDE.SYS (to provide access to the HDD)
• load PCLINK.SYS from AUTOEXEC.BAT instead

1 hour ago, TGB1718 said:

I booted into U1M menu, selected Loader, I can see the memory card, the directories, but no files, if I then select

re-boot from the loader, I get to DOS and I can see the hard disk partitions and their contents, but again it's loading the

default CONFIG.SYS from the CAR: device. Re-boot again straight to SDX and no partitions available.

Without U1MB, SIDE HDD partitions are mounted via the SIDE driver and are thus active only under SDX. When you reboot into the loader, SDX is gone, and with it the driver which gave you access to the APT partitions. Since there is nothing useful the loader can do with the HDD partitions in these circumstances, they are greyed out. Likewise, ATR files in FAT partitions are not displayed since there is nothing the system can do with them.

 

With U1MB, the OS effectively gains built-in hard disk support. The loader can then dynamically mount HDD partitions, query and display the current drive assignments, etc, and mount FAT hosted disk images.

 

As to the U1MB 130XE: did you happen to ever flash the SIDE3 firmware to the U1MB at any point?

[Doug_in_NC]

I'm someone else having difficulty accessing the Side2 HDD from the U1MB too. As a newbie on the A8 I'm not entirely sure of what I am doing. I have the U1MB set up with a fresh installation of the firmware. Spartados X enabled, PBI Bios enabled, Hard drive enabled and boot drive = default. I have verified that the CONFIG.SYS on the CAR is exactly as in the Spartados X manual, ie it does not call out the SIDE.SYS driver, so I created an ATR that is mounted on a SIO2SD and contains 2 files - SIDE.SYS and a CONFIG.SYS that has the following in it:

 

USE BANKED

DEVICE SPARTA

DEVICE SIO

DEVICE ATARIDOS

DEVICE ULTIME

DEVICE JIFFY

DEVICE RAMDISK

DEVICE SIDE

 

based on what someone else had in another thread. I have verified that on bootup the D1 is accessed before the prompt appears so it is loading something, but my CF card partitions don't appear. What have I missed? If I manually SIDE.SYS it loads the driver and I can access the drives without problem, so the problem is presumably that when CONFIG.SYS runs, it isn't looking for SIDE.SYS in the same directory as CONFIG.SYS is.

Edited February 9, 2021 by Doug_in_NC
Added information on last line

[_The Doctor__]

?

Edited February 9, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[flashjazzcat]

You don't need SIDE.SYS when you have the U1MB PBI HDD enabled, so you can remove DEVICE SIDE.

 

Also: the CONFIG.SYS setting in the BIOS setup menu specifies the partition from which you want to load CONFIG.SYS.

[Doug_in_NC]

_The Doctor_ I have the switch up.

FlashJazzCat If I don't need the SIDE.SYS when the U1MB is running, why don't I see the CF Card drives when I don't install it manually? Is it not doing what I think it is? If I boot to command line prompt I can see the SDX is the version from the U1MB but I can't access the drives. I manually enter SIDE.SYS and then I can see them, but if I type CAR to go to the loader, I see xex files but not ATRs, which I should, right?

 

 

I just remembered - I have a Side3 that is awaiting the new flash upgrade, so I have the version of U1MB firmware for the Side3 installed. Could that be the issue?

[Mark2008]

Not to take over your thread, but this reminds me of me, oh yes, because I was banging my head on config.sys and side2, just like yesterday, lol

 

My issue was that I wanted my SIDE2 to just be a 32MB partition setup as D1: which I conceptually thought of as the hard drive/boot drive.

But instead I just need a good old fashioned 1050 drive to be my D1: and it can have config.sys on it.  The SIDE2 will present it's 32M as D3

 

Anyway, come to think of it, in the MS-DOS world, the vast majority of hard disks were setup as "C:" not "A:" the first two drives were floppies.  So I'm going with that theme for now.  That is my 130XE without U1mb.

 

My 1200xl has a u1mb and I can either configure the location in hte u1mb bios, or just put  config.sys on  d1.    On that machine i don't use the side2, since it doesn't fit in the cartridge slot.

 

 

 

 

[Doug_in_NC]

Yes, I think the same way for the same reason - 32MB partitions at drives C and D with "removable" disks in A and B, even though the removable disks are much bigger than 32 MB ?

[flashjazzcat]

6 hours ago, Doug_in_NC said:

I just remembered - I have a Side3 that is awaiting the new flash upgrade, so I have the version of U1MB firmware for the Side3 installed. Could that be the issue?

Yes: this is the issue. Please don't install the SIDE3 firmware on the U1MB and expect SIDE2 to still work. I believe this is being widely misunderstood judging by the number of users with puzzling SIDE2 issues all of a sudden. With the correct firmware, getting the HDD to work really is as simple as enabling the PBI HDD. It certainly should not present a list of dramas.

[TGB1718]

12 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

As to the U1MB 130XE: did you happen to ever flash the SIDE3 firmware to the U1MB at any point?

Yes I did, I've seen your later post and it now makes sense, thanks again for your help

[_The Doctor__]

bottom line, you can no longer just swap side cartridges anymore.

It appears the u1m and or possibly incognito firmware are tailored to the version of side cartridge now.

side3 departs from side 1/2 in some way it would seem.

 

Time to see if there is a write up of what's changed between them.

[flashjazzcat]

29 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

bottom line, you can no longer just swap side cartridges anymore.

29 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

side3 departs from side 1/2 in some way it would seem.

Indeed. The SIDE3 uses SD cards and SIDE/SIDE2 use Compact Flash cards. You can still swap between CF cartridges (SIDE and SIDE2) using the SIDE PBI BIOS and plugin, so nothing changed there. But the SIDE3 PBI BIOS reports itself as the 'SIDE3 PBI BIOS' because it is designed for the SIDE3 cartridge, not a generic family comprising all 'SIDE' cartridges. Hopefully that's clear enough.

 

Nice as it would be to support all devices in the same PBI BIOS, space is at a premium and I had to dispense with the 'Z:' driver just in order to fit the SIDE3 driver into 8K of ROM space. Fortunately the HSIO driver still fits. It might be possible to cram support for SIDE/SIDE2 and SIDE3 into the same firmware, but one would have to do away with all unrolled loops at the very least, which would mean users who do not want to flip between SIDE2 and SIDE3 (for whatever purpose) on the same machine would suffer an arbitrary performance hit for no good reason.

29 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Time to see if there is a write up of what's changed between them.

Hopefully the headline features are fairly obvious (SIDE3 uses SD cards and is able to emulate cartridges, SIDE/SIDE2 use CF cards and do not emulate cartridges), but I have spent much of the past week working on updates to the user manuals, having spent several weeks prior to that preparing and testing a complete update of all hardware targets (Incognito, U1MB, SIDE/SIDE2, SIDE3, XEL-CF, etc). This will all be published very soon, but you can rest assured that the API and the general workflow regarding hard disk operation has not changed one bit. You still turn on the PBI HDD, and the hard disk then works... as long as the correct firmware is used.

Edited February 9, 2021 by flashjazzcat

[+Nezgar]

49 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

Nice as it would be to support all devices in the same PBI BIOS, space is at a premium and I had to dispense with the 'Z:' driver just in order to fit the SIDE3 driver into 8K of ROM space. Fortunately the HSIO driver still fits. It might be possible to cram support for SIDE/SIDE2 and SIDE3 into the same firmware, but one would have to do away with all unrolled loops at the very least, which would mean users who do not want to flip between SIDE2 and SIDE3 (for whatever purpose) on the same machine would suffer an arbitrary performance hit for no good reason.

Just thinking... Maybe some ROM space from the SIDE2 or SIDE3 cartridge itself could be used to provide the PBI BIOS specific to the cart in use? If may free some ROM space in the U1MB, but would also require a flash update to any SIDE2/3 cartridges... That would also mean no PBI BIOS with no SIDE cart inserted - which may be perfectly fine?

[_The Doctor__]

The plug ins section will see some more use now

I wouldn't want a performance hit at all. Having the built-in CIO “Z:” RTC device handler was a plus, sorry to see you had to dispense with it for now.

If there was some way to have the device provide it's own flavor of bios for u1m/incognito to incorporate/grab. that would be ideal.

Is a goal going to be everything modular as plug ins into the future? That makes good sense to me.

I of course am not knowing how the plug ins allocate space, would it be wasteful in some way to do that. It sounds kind of tight in there.

All of this probably already contemplated but still some thoughts.

Edited February 9, 2021 by _The Doctor__

[flashjazzcat]

12 minutes ago, Nezgar said:

Just thinking... Maybe some ROM space from the SIDE2 or SIDE3 cartridge itself could be used to provide the PBI BIOS specific to the cart in use? If may free some ROM space in the U1MB, but would also require a flash update to any SIDE2/3 cartridges... That would also mean no PBI BIOS with no SIDE cart inserted - which may be perfectly fine?

I was mulling something like that over last night, but it's a little complicated by the fact that accessing the cartridge ROM during normal operation would mess up the display when no ROM is present at $A000, and would interfere with emulated cartridges on the SIDE3 (emulation would have to be temporarily disabled so that the desired bank of HDD code could be momentarily banked in). The display interference wouldn't necessarily be an issue with stuff that happens in the PBI's INIT code (called on system reset and generally executed before the screen is initialised anyway), and this includes initialising the media and reading the partition table. So: very useful savings. If only the SIDE3 stuff was farmed out to the cartridge, everything else (HSIO, etc) would still work as before even with no cart present.

 

Aside from the extra complexity, though, I can see this approach causing more confusion among users who are less technically minded. The SIDE3 cart's ROM would need to be updated to sync with the U1MB PBI update, and unless both devices were sold with exactly the right firmware on them, nothing would work out of the box.

 

It's a perfectly good suggestion, though.

Edited February 9, 2021 by flashjazzcat
typo

[flashjazzcat]

21 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

The plug ins section will see some more use now

Plugins are now 2K in size, and Incognito can have them via a CPLD update. Of course there are a large number of combinations of device support in plugins, so that too is a headache to manage.

21 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

If there was some way to have the device provide it's own flavor of bios for u1m/incognito to incorporate/grab. that would be ideal.

This is what you'll get with external U1MB, and essentially what's already there with Incognito. If the mass storage device is built onto the board which also houses the PBI ROM, the two come as a package, so to speak. U1MB, on the other hand, now has PBI drivers for SIDE/SIDE2, XEL-CF, and SIDE3. Very flexible (one is not tied to any specific mass storage device), but a lot of work to maintain.

21 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Is a goal going to be everything modular as plug ins into the future? That makes good sense to me.

Everything hardware specific to optional hardware components is now in the plugin. This includes VBXE now, so if you have no VBXE, there is no need to have the code to configure it in the firmware.

21 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I of course am not knowing how the plug ins allocate space, would it be wasteful in some way to do that. It sounds kind of tight in there.

Ideally, one would have a set of plugin modules all bank-switched in the same memory space, each with their own RAM, but such sophisiticated design hasn't gained much traction yet. Without such hardware support, one can either make all the plugin modules relocatable and design a means of embedding them into the ROM, or just do what I have done and have a plugin source file with everything in it, and bits turned on and off via assembler directives. So: I can churn out a SIDE3/Sophia 2/PokeyMAX plugin by editing a couple of defines and hitting compile. For the most part, including support for a device which isn't present does no harm (and settings for absent hardware are greyed out), so this at least cuts down on the number of different plugin ROMs I have to produce.

 

But 2K provides enough space for stuff like the auto-loading NTSC VBXE palette, which is nice.

 

Edited February 9, 2021 by flashjazzcat
typo II

[Doug_in_NC]

I think a lot of people would be happy with a U1MB bootup message providing a warning the firmware does not support the attached cartridge type if the "wrong" Side variant is in the cartridge slot. It would certainly have helped me ?

[flashjazzcat]

28 minutes ago, Doug_in_NC said:

I think a lot of people would be happy with a U1MB bootup message providing a warning the firmware does not support the attached cartridge type if the "wrong" Side variant is in the cartridge slot.

I hear you, but the SIDE loader built into the U1MB (assuming one attempted to use the SIDE3 cart with no corresponding SIDE3 U1MB plugin) should report no SIDE/SIDE2 hardware found in the device menu when you attempt to use it with SIDE3. On the other hand, if you applied the SIDE3 U1MB firmware and run it with a SIDE2, the internal loader will start and find the cartridge, but find no supporting PBI BIOS (since it expects to see the SIDE/SIDE2 PBI BIOS).

 

Sadly there is only room in the SIDE loader to probe the hardware that is supported (therefore it's not possible to report 'I found SIDE3 and I expected SIDE2'). On the HDD/PBI side of things, there are limited opportunities to report anything at all since the entire edifice is attempting to be more or less invisible to the OS, but you do have the 'U1MB SIDE3 PBI BIOS' message when you boot SDX, at least.

 

Edited February 9, 2021 by flashjazzcat
clarity

[Doug_in_NC]

OK, that's reasonable. How about a really easy fix. On the Side 3 loader page on your website, it says "For proper Ultimate 1MB operation with SIDE3, please install the release candidate main BIOS and PBI BIOS for SIDE3:". How about adding something like "Please note this firmware is NOT backwards compatible with Side 2." or something similar.

[flashjazzcat]

1 hour ago, Doug_in_NC said:

How about adding something like "Please note this firmware is NOT backwards compatible with Side 2." or something similar.

That's fair and reasonable.