[MiNT] Where things get fussy....

["Brian J. Roland" <bjr@localink4.com>]

After spending some time with a somewhat more stable Falcon/CT2b....
I think I've narrowed the worst of my problems down to the EtherNEC interface.
With this thing plugged in, the Falcon loves to give Bus Error #2 on boot-up.
Sometimes it doesn't even make it to the bios screen....just sits there green.
Pull out the eNEC and it boots right nicely...usually.....
Sometimes I get lucky and the Falcon boots and works with the eNEC plugged in,
and the networking works fine as well in these cases.

Minus the eNEC, I had booted easily, and run the system with good results for
several sessions....even difficult things possibly not GEM clean, like CuBase
Audio ran smoothly in the environment.

Later, I've picked up some other problem out of the blue, that never happened
before.  On launching N_AES I almost always get a pid illegal instruction
message when XCONTROL tries to load.  Same with ZCONTROL...no matter what CPXes
I try to run, or not to run.  This had never happened before....and I get it
with or without the eNEC installed....even with no XDD, XFS, XIF modules loaded
at all.....just a plain MiNT-NAES setup without the unix mode and so forth.

Removing the TASKBAR seemed to help....at least the setup was useful after the
error messages...
But none of the CPX handlers load properly during the bootup.

Odd that I can manually launch XCONTROL after it's been spit out once...and even
tho' there is no PID for it showing in the ps list....the AES asks permission to
launch a 'second' copy.

MiNT Kernel is 1.15.12 from the sparemint.atariforge.net package.
Memory protection is off (later discovered that for CT2b it cuts itself off even
if named mint.prg).
All the mods in the MiNT folder are from this archive....
The EasyMiNT distribution on my ext2 partition is 1.4.1
HDDriver is 7.93

AUTO:
    NVDI 5.03
    Clocky III (Have tried minus this as well)
    MINTNP
    DSPIRQ (Have tried minus this as well)

MINT:
    ext2
    networking sockets
    enec2 (have a couple of versions of this testing...of course not loaded at
the same time)
    xconsole

No, I do not have any other mods loaded, as I don't use the serial ports, slip,
etc....

ACC:
    ST-GUIDE
    CLOCKY CONTROL
    N_AES File Selector
    MiNT Setter
    XCONTROL or ZCONTROL

CPX:
    General CPX to ensure blitter is disabled (MUST HAVE FOR FALCON).
    N_AES setter

GlueSTiK runs from mint.cnf
fschk runs from mint.cnf and reports a clean system.
Paths and modes seem to be in order according to MiNT docs....
WBCACHE is not used.
VFAT is only for one partition that I can afford to be reckless with, and it
gets backed up daily.
My AES and DeskTop are located on the C: drive.  I then run them off the drive
u: once logged in with symbolic links pointing home.  I.E.  c:\n_aes becomes
/n_aes  on the drive u: file system.

All this boots to the Easymint login prompt....
I make sure AESPATH and AESDIR environment variables are set, and also make sure
these locations are properly in the PATH.  cd into the aes dir for good measure
and launch n_aes.

n_aes is currently set to only run Thing as it starts....and of course the AES
always loads its ACC path.
Somewhere along the line what ever deals with CPX management is
breaking....apparently it gets far enough along to ensure the blitter is off or
I'd be in a real mess....but then it gives an error...tap a key and thing
finally loads but no XControl!  Same for ZControl if I try that instead.  When I
have time will drop test all the CPXes one by one to see who the bad guy
is....but I'm behooved, because I didn't get this before.

It's something new every time!  Fix one thing, and it breaks another LOL.

I'm confident the eNEC itself is in good order....in my STacy or Mega it purrs
right along with STing.
I have put freshly tested RAM into the machine, all rated at 60ns or
better....so bad RAM shouldn't be an issue...

Anyway....I'm open for ideas....
I do wonder if the power supply might be too weak for the eNEC?  I'm only
running a really low power ide laptop drive in this thing (a credit card sized
20gig thing made by IBM)....and an extra fan....but I suppose it's possible.

Is it possible to run an external power supply to the eNEC setup?  It might not
hurt to take that load off the Falcon, as it wasn't designed to carry all the
extra RAM CT2b offers.  (I have 14mb STRam and 32mb of FastRam.  While the 32mb
EDO SIMM seems to work no problem...it's the type that has 16 larger RAM chips
on both sides...so I suppose it might be a power hungry SIMM.  The ST RAM is a
16mb low density/profile type ...only 8 tiny chips on board...it sits in a
Wizztronics memory board.  The only test I know how to run to this RAM while
installed in the Falcon is the system startup test....it reports all is well.
Can't seem to find any utility anywere to really do hard core testing on both
types of memory :/  For that matter, I can't find any kind of memory tester at
all for Falcon class machines....even without the FAST RAM :/

How to test the Power Supply?  I have a voltage meter...but no idea what to look
for, or that will even to the job.

As for the CPX loading issue....who knows?
The binaries on disk are all fine...they run clean under other setups
(TOS/Geneva/MagiC), and have done checksum verifications agaisnt the originals
to verify something's not eating away at files on the hard-drive.

Thanks,
Brian