FreeMiNT 1.14 BETA-2 special binary and tips..

[Sven Karlsson <f92sk@efd.lth.se>]

Hi!

I have compiled a special binary which only leave 2Mb of ST-ram. It is handy
for falcons with little memory.

There seems to be several bugs in HDDriver. I tested HDDiver a bit some time 
ago and found it highly unstable on my TT so I don't use it. Users using 
HDDriver together with FreeMiNT 1.14 have reported numerous errors. These 
errors are probably bugs in HDDriver. I am very interested in reports regarding
success or failures using various HDDrivers. I will make a version for color 
monitor users which can aid in the betatesting.

The problem seems to be that HDDriver belive that a transfer from the scsi 
device is faulty and try to retransfer the data. This means that hddriver 
hands and you hear a metallic clicking sound from the HD (ie the hd seeking). 
I have heard from a friend of mine (which is developing Zero-X) that HDDriver 
is lousy at communicating with special devices like samplesynths.

These problems can occur from the fact that I am using the expanded version of 
rwabs (with long sectornumbers). I have heard that HDDriver might have some 
problems with this.

I am writing drivers for floppy, ide, asci and scsi for Fenix. I will perhaps 
incoperate these sources in FreeMiNT in some way so that the swapper will 
access the hd direct.

I don't have Multi TOS and have not tested it with FreeMiNT 1.14. I am also 
interested in reports from users of various gem extensions.

Tip: To test if the VM is properly installed try to view the available ram 
using newdesk, devpac, lattice or similar program which show the available 
memory. The amount of ram should be roughly the same as the size of the 
swappartiton.

Tip 2: If you are encountering problems always remove all autos and accs. Also
strip down your mint.cnf to a bare minimum (no execs and so on..).

I get a little bit worried since I only get mails from people saying that the 
VM_extension didn't work for them. I would like to hear from people that have 
got things working!

Regards
	Sven Karlsson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Student of Engineering Physics at Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden

Soft- and Hardware developer @ Istari Software
Current project: Code ,an interactive development tool for video
	game consoles including Editor,Debugger and Assembler
	Fenix, a new OO OS for Atari compatible computers.
E-mail: f92sk@efd.lth.se or tomten@df.lth.se
WWW: http://www.efd.lth.se/~f92sk