Author: Johan Klockars (62.13.18.80)
Date: 03-03-2003 13:18
Generally, it's easiest to contact me directly regarding problems with fVDI/Eclipse. I only read these boards at irregular intervals.
...
> and tried to get the Eclipse card running.
>
> The trouble is, that every so often, it hangs
:-(
>I can run the falcon normally for as long as I like, but when I have the display through the Eclipse card, I am lucky if it lasts for more than about 2 or 3 minutes!
Might be some kind of substandard connection.
You don't say what kind of machine you have, by the way. I've never heard of this kind of thing happening on a normal Falcon.
AB040 equipped ones (like my own) have been known to sometimes exhibit a strange problem that could potentially cause a lockup (more likely some black pixels when blitting from screen to normal RAM), however. It's been quite some time since I last saw or heard about that, though.
> What causes it to hang?
Difficult to say. I might be able to put together some kind of test program to investigate further.
> Well, sometimes when I move to the menubar... That is often a cause...
If menu background save caching is not active, this will cause a lot of traffic between the card and the Falcon. The more traffic, the higher the likelyhood that some instability causes trouble.
> Disk access, that does it too!
That's quite strange, though, since that should not touch fVDI or the Eclipse card in any way.
> Pretty much anything can cause it actually!
:-(
> I have tried various settings in the FVDI.SYS file, but nothign seems to make any difference?
If you've somehow run into the problem I've only seen with AB040, the switches related to screen<->RAM blitting should be the only ones that can 'help'.
The AES background save caching is normally turned on by the fVDI ACC. General screen->RAM caching is turned on via 'screencache'. IIRC, when running without the PCI BIOS (no 'pcibios' switch), such blits are normally not done at all, but can be turned on via 'doblit'.
Note that these are all driver switches.
>I have also tried the other SYS files that I got from the Eclipse support site, but they do nothing to help, and of course, I have
Please, send me the FVDI.SYS you've been using. And any information you might have on variations you've tried.
It might be a good idea to give what I mentioned above a try.
There are no switches that will actually remove your problem (your hangs are obviously not something that is supposed to happen), but if the problem is related to the AB040 one (has to do with Eclipse bank switching in some way, I think), cutting down on the screen->RAM transfers may help your machine stay up a whole lot longer.
> also downloaded newer drivers, and I have tried different versions of FVDI.PRG / PCIBIOS.PRG / RAGE.SYS and I have had some
You should always use the very latest ones, and mixing old with new is not guaranteed to work at all (that will normally be very obvious, though).
> luck in that the system now just pauses instead of hanging, but again, it only does
Interesting.
When do these pauses occur? How long are they?
>this a few times before hanging, but in the end, it hangs like it always has!
:-(
> The best I have managed it, is for it to survive for about 10 minutes, but that was because I swicthed it on and went for a refill of my coffee!
Could you perhaps try doing only things that do not cause large amounts of data transfer? Especially transfers from the screen memory to RAM.
> Please help!
I will certainly do my best, but it might be a better idea to keep this to email.
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