After a long period of time I've decided to bring back to life the A1XE I got a few years ago. As I did not have all necessary HW for testing purposes I was asking a friend who gladly helped me out on hw level. Now the situation is kinda promising. The config has now a Radeon9250 PCI gfx card, a 250GB IDE HDD, a DVD writer, (it seem to be replaced as it refuses to read written discs, albeit had no issue with any original ones.) Current issues are: - No sound. As I've read it is a common issue with the mobo's onboard VIA97 audio. The question here is which soundcard could be the best for this machine? - AHI. It doesn't shows up any card(s), albeit drivers are in their dedicated folders. In AHI prefs I have options for Filesave and "device", but it doesn't answers the questions, which hw the system tries to use (or it doesn't tells me correctly to understand :D ) - No USB. I was trying the motherboard's USB connector on the backside, but neither a pendrive nor an external DVD drive was recognized. Shall I use a PCI USB card instead? Second question on this one is about the driver, to ensure it will work properly... - Not enough RAM. The machine has now 256MB ram, which is flawless, but not really enough I think. I was bought 2x256 MB Infineon ram sticks, set the available memory to 512 in UBoot, but the system randomly crashes. Sometimes during the time when the AmigaOS4 logo appears on the screen during booting, sometimes it reaches the WB, but then various things are crashing. Is this machine really this sensitive to the brand of ram modules? What would work without any issue? I'd hunt down preferably 2x512MB but at least 2x256MB would be better than the simple 256MB I have right now.
@Reynolds I don't have experience with the real machine, only know some things about it from writing emulation of it but I recommend studying @sailor's articles at https://intuitionbase.com/tag/amigaone-xe That should answer some questions about accepted memory. As for sound I think some of the motherboards omitted the codec chip as they could not make the AmigaOS driver work with the VIA chip so it was thought to be useless. I think this is the small square chip inline with the AGP slot near the edge of the board next to the ports at the back. There are two pictures at https://intuitionbase.com/system/amigaone-xe and one of those does not have a chip there. These are not too high resolution so hard to see but here's another picture where that chip is missing. If your board does not have that codec chip then on-board via-ac97 audio won't work. A sound card that AmigaOS has a driver for should work. I had no problem with emulated USB so I think it's supposed to work. Does your USB port work with a keyboard or mouse? Maybe it's just the devices you plugged in were not recognised for some reason but it could be real machines has some issues I'm not aware of.
@Reynolds Do you know if your A1 XE has the "DMA fix" applied? It was a failed attempt to work around the Articia S bugs, both on the AmigaOne XE (re-soldering of some wires required) and MicroA1 (already included in the release versions and has to be undone to make it usable) as well as the Pegasos1 (April "fix"). Without the "DMA fix" the onboard VIA PATA IDE controller only works reliable in PIO modes, but not in DMA/UDMA modes. OTOH nearly everything else (ethernet, USB, sound cards, etc.) worked. With the "DMA fix" applied onboard VIA PATA IDE works in DMA/UDMA modes, but nearly everything else using DMA (ethernet, USB, sound, etc.) stops working, at least if 2 or more DMA controllers are used at the same time.
Onboard audio doesn't work in most (or even all?) release versions of the AmigaOne XE, as @balaton wrote because the DAC chip was removed. Only the AmigaOne SE, and maybe some early beta versions of the XE, still had it. No idea if the MicroA1 included the audio DAC chip or not.
@joerg On my mA1 I have onboard audio, ethernet and USB working fine, as well as the UDMA. Are you sure that this is the case for that machine?
@Reynolds You can find information about these fixes at https://intuitionbase.com/system/amigaone-xe, in the attachments section at the end of the file. There is a zip file with all the information. This is also available in OS4depot.
Reynolds wrote:After a long period of time I've decided to bring back to life the A1XE I got a few years ago. As I did not have all necessary HW for testing purposes I was asking a friend who gladly helped me out on hw level. Now the situation is kinda promising. The config has now a Radeon9250 PCI gfx card, a 250GB IDE HDD, a DVD writer, (it seem to be replaced as it refuses to read written discs, albeit had no issue with any original ones.) Current issues are: - No sound. As I've read it is a common issue with the mobo's onboard VIA97 audio. The question here is which soundcard could be the best for this machine? - AHI. It doesn't shows up any card(s), albeit drivers are in their dedicated folders. In AHI prefs I have options for Filesave and "device", but it doesn't answers the questions, which hw the system tries to use (or it doesn't tells me correctly to understand :D )
Probably you have newer version of motherboard, without sound chip. Best is use PCI sound card, like Creative SBLive! - look here for compatible cards. Quote:
- No USB. I was trying the motherboard's USB connector on the backside, but neither a pendrive nor an external DVD drive was recognized. Shall I use a PCI USB card instead? Second question on this one is about the driver, to ensure it will work properly...
If you have different USB sticks, try them. Maybe some of them works. To add PCI USB 2.0 card is good idea, because XE has only USB 1.1 onboard. Any NEC or VIA card should work.
BUT: if you will have more cards, XE is picky with PCI card combinations. You should experiment with it and try to place them in different PCI slots combinations.
Quote:
- Not enough RAM. The machine has now 256MB ram, which is flawless, but not really enough I think. I was bought 2x256 MB Infineon ram sticks, set the available memory to 512 in UBoot, but the system randomly crashes. Sometimes during the time when the AmigaOS4 logo appears on the screen during booting, sometimes it reaches the WB, but then various things are crashing. Is this machine really this sensitive to the brand of ram modules? What would work without any issue? I'd hunt down preferably 2x512MB but at least 2x256MB would be better than the simple 256MB I have right now.
Thanks in advance.
You definitely need ECC REG modules - something like this.. Without REG XE is unstable, mainly with two modules. With REG modules XE is capable of 2 GB RAM without problems.
AmigaOS3: Amiga 1200 AmigaOS4: Micro A1-C, AmigaOne XE, Pegasos II, Sam440ep, Sam440ep-flex, AmigaOne X1000 MorphOS: Efika 5200b, Pegasos I, Pegasos II, Powerbook, Mac Mini, iMac, Powermac Quad
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