#GVP & GigaMem
3 messages in this thread
This is for anyone who has pulled their hair out trying to get GigaMem to work
with the A2000 G-Force 040 Combo board. GigaMem will work but there are a few
things to do first. First off, you need the 68040.lib ver 37.3 not 37.10.
Secondly, the data cache must be turned off, the inst cache can remain on.
Finally you should have setpatch 37.38. I have gotten GigaMem to work reliably
under this configuration using a second startup-seq for use with AdPro.
GigaMem will not work with either the 37.4 or 37.10 040.libs. I've found this
out through a lot of trial and error not to mention a call to Inovatronics. As
for Inovatronics tech support line, that is another story in itself. The
person I spoke to was somewhat obnoxious being that he was more interested in
getting me to say the correct pronouciation of GigaMem than he was in why I
called. Further, claims were made that GVP 040 boards do not use true 68040's
but that GVP uses 040's without MMU's since the board supplies the hardware for
relocating Kickstart. I don't know one way or the other if there is any truth
to this but I would take anything said from Inovatronics with a grain of salt
since I got this to work with a board which supposidly has no MMU.
I have been seeing and hearing problems similar to yours, and a new SetPatch
has just been released for V2.04+ that supposedly fixes a lot of '040 problems.
I have not tested it yet, but it seems that different versions of the
68040.library seem to have various problems…
The GForce040 has ALWAYS shipped with real '040's with MMUs. The Kickstart
Remapping hardware is additional and was put on the board because the current
CPU command did not know how to deal with the '040's MMU, so the only way to
remap Kickstart when the board was launched was to provide onboard hardware.
While I have found GigaMem to work reliably in the situations I've tried it in,
I am always leery of generalized Virtual Memory handlers since the Amiga's
Operating System wasn't designed to handle it well. Specialized Virtual Memory
within an application is much safer and robust since the application running is
in control of what data is swapped out to disk, rather than general data and
instruction code getting swapped. Oh well, good luck with your new found
configuration.
Thanks for the info. When I first installed the GVP board I kept running into
problems with the system crashing which turn out to be the 040.lib I was using.
I hope the newer version of the library has less problems. As for GigaMem, I
only use it for one program, ADPRO since it sometimes need a large block of
contiguous memory. It would be nice if a newer version of this prog had
virtual memory capabilities built into it.