Faicuai Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 4 hours ago, Level42 said: is based on inaccurate measurements and thus based on loose sand. This is off topic. I will be addressing your concerns on the corresponding power-metering thread. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
candle Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 2 hours ago, Level42 said: Anyway, the three different modern day fast 64GB SD cards will arrive this evening, hopefully I have some time to test… just remember to format them to fat32, as extfat or ntfs is not supported by the loader, and 64gb is beyond capabilities of fat32 (you'll have to make two 32gb partitions) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 28 minutes ago, candle said: just remember to format them to fat32, as extfat or ntfs is not supported by the loader, and 64gb is beyond capabilities of fat32 (you'll have to make two 32gb partitions) Hmmm, one can download some third party FAT32 formatter and format the whole card as one partition. FAT32 supports up to 2TB with standard 512byte sector size and up to 16TB with 4k sector size; max. length of a file -under FAT32- is however 4GB. Think it is just Windows formatter that limits FAT32 to max. 32GB. When formatted with a third party FAT32 formatter, then Windows has no problems reading a larger card with FAT32, e.g. 64GB. Works even under good old Win XP, where I have formatted a 64GB SD-card with FAT32 and use it with my AVG cart. for playing back dozens of videos. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted July 21, 2021 Author Share Posted July 21, 2021 (edited) Used to have a 64GB FAT32 formatted test VHD here and the SIDE loader will indeed handle it without problems. I forget which tool I used to format it. Edited July 21, 2021 by flashjazzcat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+scorpio_ny Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 19 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said: Hmmm, one can download some third party FAT32 formatter and format the whole card as one partition. FAT32 supports up to 2TB with standard 512byte sector size and up to 16TB with 4k sector size; max. length of a file -under FAT32- is however 4GB. Think it is just Windows formatter that limits FAT32 to max. 32GB. When formatted with a third party FAT32 formatter, then Windows has no problems reading a larger card with FAT32, e.g. 64GB. Works even under good old Win XP, where I have formatted a 64GB SD-card with FAT32 and use it with my AVG cart. for playing back dozens of videos. @CharlieChaplin Yes, definitely! One can download an official SD card formatter from the SD Card association (both Mac and Windows). I actually needed to this to format a card so it would work on a Flashback portable as recommended in the Flashback forum. SD Memory Card Formatter 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+scorpio_ny Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 @flashjazzcat and @candle Thanks again for your time and information! I am not sure how or when I turned on that option on, but I am glad there is a resolution. I will run the new update as soon as I get an opportunity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 People, I'm a Mac user. I don't need no freaking external tools to format a 64GB FAT32 partition.... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted July 21, 2021 Author Share Posted July 21, 2021 (edited) 12 minutes ago, Level42 said: People, I'm a Mac user. I don't need no freaking external tools to format a 64GB FAT32 partition... Aha... so that's how I did it. EDIT: WTF am I talking about. I was using a VHD in Windows. Been a long day. Edited July 21, 2021 by flashjazzcat 1 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 (edited) OK so I formatted all cards to FAT32 single partition. Next I copied my old 4 GB Sandisk micro-SD card back onto my Mac. The total size was 1,21 GB (1 point 21 Giga...Wattssss .........what was I thinking !!!) and the file count was 23.488. I thought it would be interesting to see how much time it took to write the files to the new cards. Well....it was quite surprising. Sandisk 120: 7 minutes 42 seconds Sandsik 150: 7 minutes 33 seconds Sandisk 170: 8 minutes 41 seconds Wait that can't be right, the 170 card is the slowest ???? OK let's do that last one again.... I'll do a full reformat on it first.... Edited July 21, 2021 by Level42 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 OKaayyyyyy, this time it took 9 minutes and 15 seconds to write everything to the 170 card..... pretty crazy. Sure I have several applications open but they are all the same for all 4 runs. I did turn off Time Machine which makes back-ups whenever the system is "doing nothing" to make sure that wouldn't interfere.... I have to say that my Mac is quite old (late 2009 model) and I used the built-in SD card reader. Maybe this all isn't the fastest stuff now, but at least I'm happy the SD card reader supports the 64GB cards (I read it should support up to 2TB, and I haven't seen those SD cards for sale ;)) I guess reading all three back might say something as well, but the goals wasn't measuring performance on the Mac but on the A8/SIDE3. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 "But then I figured......What the hell ?" Reading back times: Sandisk 120: 2 minutes 16 seconds Sandsik 150: 2 minutes 18 seconds Sandisk 170: 2 minutes 12 seconds I am tending to think the built-in card-reader is the bottleneck here..... Can hardly call those numbers "very different"..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 (edited) Well well....interesting for sure. Did some first testing. On first test the 120 and 170 cards ran the PDM music files fine (something I couldn't achieve with my old 4GB Sandisk Micro SD card). However, I swear on the first time using the 150 card NONE of the PDM files would work. After some switching around (testing PoP, Flob and Numen) the PDM music files DID play just fine on the 150 card.... More interesting: All 3 cards show exactly the same behavior when it comes to loading all 3 PoP car files and Flob: The first time I push the joystick button to launch the games, the little clock on the bottom starts turning for about 4 turns and then I get a NAK error. Then, when I simply ignore this and push the joystick button again, the game loads just fine. This behavior is totally repeatable on all cards, and with all CAR files of PoP and Flob. I have NEVER had this happen with my old 4GB SD card. Numen loaded fine from all three cards BUT the time (from starting the load from the menuscreen with the cat and clock) until the 100% (black screen) takes EXACTLY as long as my old 4GB SD card...... (33.7 seconds). In fact it is also exactly the same on all three brand new SD cards. I don't know what conclusions to draw from this (apart from that I might be sending ALL SD cards back.... LOL). Edited July 21, 2021 by Level42 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 (edited) Something else happened: SIDE3 doesn't seem to NOT like it that I'm switching cards around. Note that I powered down between switching cards (this time not out of habit but to be sure to "start fresh" with every next card). I got two "garbled" screens while going from the first new card to the next, and then again to the third.... When I hit escape, I simply got the regular SD card contents and all worked fine, but it looked a bit messy. (Maybe this was fixed a few days ago by you Jon ? Remember I'm still on 0.39 with SIDE3). Edited July 21, 2021 by Level42 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 (edited) Apart from all this, I am daring enough to even suggest some extra features: U1MB: make the joystick button cancel the "count-down timer" like the space bar does. (Yes, I am THAT lazy.... :D) SIDE3, PDM player: enable joystick control: - Push button = [SPACE BAR] = pause - left = [LEFT ARROW KEY] = scrub back - right = [RIGHT ARROW KEY] = scrub forward - up = [Escape] (Return to menu) That leaves us down. How about "next song" for that one ? Or am I asking too much now ? Yes, indeed, I'm still _that_ lazy..... (not sure if joystick control would hinder PDM playback though ?) Edited July 21, 2021 by Level42 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted July 21, 2021 Author Share Posted July 21, 2021 You have an unholy mess on your hands there. Minor version bumps in the loader will not fix those troubles. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 8 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said: You have an unholy mess on your hands there. Minor version bumps in the loader will not fix those troubles. Could this be caused because, although the cards are physically different, they have exactly the same content ? Just a wild guess, as always Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted July 21, 2021 Author Share Posted July 21, 2021 Hardware issue, I'm afraid. Media change detection does a checksum of the entire MBR. I'll add joystick control to the PDM player in the next revision, anyway. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 (edited) Nice Yeah it does keep happening between power-ups. But ONLY when I switch cards ! When I hot-swap the cards it's not happening. These cards seem to be "allergic" to CAR and BIN files: Just tried the newest version of Space Harrier, same "clock-NAK error-running at 2nd launch" happening. Even a dog-standard cartridge 16k BIN file of Donkey Kong shows the NAK error and loads fine the second time... Just popped my old card back in ..... NO issues at all (except PDM loading of course).... We're onto something....but I'm not that sure if this is the "PoP" issue that some others experience... Edited July 21, 2021 by Level42 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted July 21, 2021 Author Share Posted July 21, 2021 You have tried a different Atari, I take it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted July 21, 2021 Share Posted July 21, 2021 Do you have something other than a Mac to format the SD card's in? I've had issues with Mac's and FAT32 formatting before, I've also had issues mounting AFS formatted partitions on my Mac. Perhaps boot of a live Ubuntu distro and format using the Disks utility? 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 22, 2021 Share Posted July 22, 2021 48 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said: You have tried a different Atari, I take it? Not yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 22, 2021 Share Posted July 22, 2021 36 minutes ago, Mazzspeed said: Do you have something other than a Mac to format the SD card's in? I've had issues with Mac's and FAT32 formatting before, I've also had issues mounting AFS formatted partitions on my Mac. Perhaps boot of a live Ubuntu distro and format using the Disks utility? I formatted my old 4GB SD card exactly the same way, why would this give issues now ? I could make two partitions I guess… Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted July 22, 2021 Share Posted July 22, 2021 Just now, Level42 said: I formatted my old 4GB SD card exactly the same way, why would this give issues now ? I could make two partitions I guess… I thought your old 4GB card had issues playing back sound files? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 22, 2021 Share Posted July 22, 2021 (edited) 6 hours ago, Mazzspeed said: I thought your old 4GB card had issues playing back sound files? Yes it does but I figured this was due to it's slow speed and I fully expected the new cards to show no issues at all with it (and apart from the initial issue of the files not playing on the 150 card, PDM playback works fine on all three now). That would be a hardware thing of the slow card not being able to provide the data fast enough. At least, that's all assumptions.... I also don't see why OSX's Disk Utility would create anything different from what f.i. a Windows PC would do. But we indeed should rule the possibility out. I just had a look at the only Windows device that I have here (my work's HP laptop/tablet hybrid thing....which attempts to combine the advantages of a laptop with those of a tablet but the result is that you only have the disadvantages of a laptop and those of a tablet.....) and sure enough it doesn't even have a SD card reader..... I don't have an external SD card reader either. So, since Jon uses a 32GB SD card, maybe I should try partition one of the cards into two chunks ? Or I can try and find the tool Scorpyo mentioned, from the SD Card association.... looks like I found it here: https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/ Wouldn't we expect reputable companies like Microsoft and Apple to fully comply to the rules of the SD card association ? Anyway, I'll give it a try with the fastest (170) card. OK, at the very least we should accept that the SD card association's formatter yields exactly the same results on bot Windows and OSX, right ? Edited July 22, 2021 by Level42 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Level42 Posted July 22, 2021 Share Posted July 22, 2021 Well, that road ended very quickly. The SD Card Formatter doesn't even give you any options about how to format the card. It just enables you to select which card (should you have more readers with SD cards) and a choice between Quick format and Overwrite format (which is possible with Disk Manager too I believe, if you select the right options). Then you can enter the volume label and that's it. It shows which card you have inserted and then formats it in ExFat. And there's no way to change it to FAT32..... For the sake of it I decided to do an Overwrite format, and next I'll format it to FAT32 again with Disk Manager and try again, but the SD cards came from the factory with ExFat so I don't expect this to make any difference. Next option would be using two partitions of 32 GB... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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