AmigaOne XE-G4 resurrection

@Reynolds

With regards to your missing USB, check UBoot prefs -> Hardware tab. The motherboard USB ports can be deactivated there. (I bought my A1XE second hand, and the previous owner had, for some reason, disabled the rear ports).

The motherboard USB is only 1.1 (I think,might even be 1.0), so I do recommend getting a PCI USB card. They could possibly be tricky to find these days.

I always had issues with USB file trasnfer until I replaced the motherboard fan.

The latest versions of UBoot is 1.1.4. I got it from someone, can't recall who. Maybe Steve Solie? It adds booting from SATA, which is a godsend these days, and the only "bug" that I know of is a graphical glitch (the text is a little too big for the menus).

@daveyw

Thanks for the tip, I'll going to check the settings then.
Yes, I think the USB1.1 is rather slow so will get a PCI USB for faster transfer.

Thanks again

From my experience with the XE:

Run memtest overnight after installing new memory.
I never got two dimms to work, tried various 1024MB ECC CL2/CL3 dimms and they only worked solo,
OS4 reports 2048MB but using over 1024MB would immediately cause glitches and crashes.

I also tried a 2048MB dimm but that wouldn't boot OS4,
1024MB is the best you're going to get I'm afraid, it's likely a bug of the Northbridge's memory controller.


Regarding USB, the motherboard USB is not able to detect USB devices being hotplugged (inserted after boot) due to missing resistors, but devices plugged in before boot do work.
Some say you can also hook up a USB hub to the motherboard ports and get hotplugging that way.

When getting a USB2 card, avoid cards based on the VIA VT6202 chipset, Doesn't work. VIA 6212 is ok and the best performing are NEC/Renesas based USB2 cards.
(I consistently got a single whole extra frame per second in Quake with NEC)


Sound Blaster Live is a good card, but there are too many variations of the "Live" card that use completely different chipsets that won't work with OS4.
CMI8738 based PCI sound cards are still plenty available as new stock on ebay and are just as good.

I also have a AGP Radeon 9250 and spare CMI8738 soundcard, if you're interested then I can send them to you for the cost of shipping.

@daveyw

I booted from a SATA drive in 2011 and probably before that (v. 1.1.1), maybe you mean a mechanism that doesn't need the env variable?

@Thematic
Quote:U-Boot 1.1.1, and earlier (beta) versions, did have some SATA support already, but IIRC only for the SII3114, not for all Silicon Image SATA controllers supported on AmigaOS 4.x.
Support for the SII3112 and SII3152 may only have been added in later versions of U-Boot (1.1.4, 1.2.x).

@joerg
This can be tested with QEMU which emulates SiI3112 and it boots fine with "U-Boot 1.1.1 (Mar 3 2005 - 16:42:53), Build: 03/03/05" so I think it should work on real machine too. But maybe there could be some other issues unrelated to the controller and U-Boot such as newer drives implementing different ATA standard versions which may cause additional incompatibility with some drives. Maybe it's not without bugs though as it only recognised a CDROM on first port. When connected to second port with first port empty it did not find it but connecting to first port and then selecting SII Serial CDROM from boot sequence booted. Here's the command to emulate this setup that I've tried:

The ide.0 and ide.1 are the VIA southbridge PATA ports, ide.2 and ide.3 are the SiI3112 SATA ports (you can find this with info qtree -b in QEMU Monitor). It did not find CD with bus=ide.3 but works on ide.2. (You won't see graphics without -device sm501 and boot.iso with SM502 driver added but it's enough to test booting.)

@balaton
Quote:Except for the PCI IDs and number of ports the AmigaOS, and probably U-Boot, drivers for 3112, 3114 and 3152 are identical.
They don't even use/support any SATA features like Native Command Queuing, but just use the old PATA compatible registers and ATA/ATAPI commands, incl. master/slave.
IIRC ATA/ATAPI-7 (UDMA 6: 133 (PATA), 150 (SATA)), SATA 1.0, was the max. supported version by the drivers, but depending on the ATA version supported by the drives used a lower ATA version with less features may have to be used.
Quote:Booting from the 2nd port should work as well, but may require one or both ofconf: 0=empty, 1=ATA (HD/SSD), 2=ATAPI (CD/DVD/BD). 2 numbers for the 3112 and 3152 (2 ports), 4 numbers for the 3114 and Sam440ep (onboard 3114 chip, 4 ports).

I can't test anything with QEmu myself, the only AmigaOS 4.1 versions I have are the Sam440ep and X5000 ones, but no AmigaOne XE (some early AmigaOS 4.0 beta versions should still be on one of my old PATA HDs, but I don't have a PC nor an Amiga with a PATA controller anymore), Pegasos2 nor Sam460 versions.

@joerg
Quote:
Are these for AmigaOS or U-Boot? When connecting the cdrom to the second port U-Boot did not detect it and listed both ports as empty but there's also a known bug that on QEMU an empty port appear to have an unknown device attached so that could also confuse some clients although I haven't seen any so far, this only results in some spurious warnings about non-existent devices. So it's more likely that U-Boot is somehow not checking second port when first port is empty or similar although it lists both ports correctly. This is what I get with ide-cd,bus=ide.3:

and this is with ide-cd,bus=ide.2

Even with attaching another ide-cd to second port it seems to be ignored so only first port seems to be tested by U-Boot with default settings.

@balaton
Quote:Both are using the same NVRAM env variables.

@joerg

Quote:Except that SetEnv issued from within AmigaOS won't set the NVRAM variables, for that you need NVSetVar (if it exists for your machine type).

Best regards,

Niels