Firmware Upgrade Issues to Note and new HD Driver Question
Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2012 9:06 am
Hi all,
I got my login details for the A-Eon site (found in the spam folder in gmail), logged in successfully and downloaded the CFE firmware upgrade and the updated 2D Graphics card drivers.
A couple of points to mention that I found during the firmware install - I followed the install guide closely but hit some troubles:
1. The firmware installation guide says that you can use a CDROM to do the upgrade - however the "-iso" flag was not recognised in the "load" command shown in the guide. It comes back with an error saying there is no such flag. I ran "help load" and confirmed that "-iso" wasn't there as an option. So I used USB stick with cfe.bin in the root folder instead...
2. The USB stick needed to be plugged into a specific USB port in order to be recognised within CFE. The first USB port on the top of the X1000 Case doesn't work within CFE (works fine in AmigaOS4) - the second USB port works in CFE.
3. I had to find a USB stick less than 4Gb (I only have one - the Imation 512Mb worked) before I could successfully load the cfe.bin image without errors. I tried 3 different brand 4Gb USB sticks (San Disk, Toshiba and Lexar) and one 8Gb San Disk USB stick, all of which cfe recognised when plugged in, but none of which would load the cfe.bin image without errors.
Specifically, the error reported over and over while loading cfe.bin was something to do with fat >=2 , whatever that means! (sorry I don't remember the exact error message). I should mention that the load of cfe.bin from USB stick completed in all these error cases (which I guess means the usb file system was readable), but when I used spi to load the resultant firmware image and used the spi read command, the output result didn't match what the documentation said needed to be in the output, which means the upgrade didn't work. All these usb sticks work fine under Windows and Mac - I ran a Windows 7 scandisk on each of them after the problems but no errors were found. With a 512Mb USB stick the CFE.bin load worked fine, no errors during loading and SPI copy and SPI read command output was correct, as per the instructions.
In any case it is working for me now and the firmware applied successfully with the new boot screen on my X1000, but I wanted to make you aware of these problems in case something can be done in future to improve the process and support the CDROM upgrade option and higher capacity USB sticks.
Despite the problems I had, I do appreciate the work that went into making these updates - very much appreciated.
A question I had was in relation to the 2D Radeon HD graphic card drivers update for X1000 which I also installed today. Can someone please advise what changes or improvements we should expect to see as end users with the updated 2D Radeon HD driver on the X1000? From what I see so far I haven't noticed any difference in performance, but I am not sure what I should be looking for, or adjusting....eg. should video playback be smoother, or higher resolution hd video now plays back without issues? I tested Youtube playback in Timberwolf RC1 using the HTML5 trial and it still cuts the audio and video when playing back..
I assume that I also need to continue to use Wazp3d library in place of Warp3D on the X1000 until the HD 3D drivers are complete?
Catcha,
Epsilon
I got my login details for the A-Eon site (found in the spam folder in gmail), logged in successfully and downloaded the CFE firmware upgrade and the updated 2D Graphics card drivers.
A couple of points to mention that I found during the firmware install - I followed the install guide closely but hit some troubles:
1. The firmware installation guide says that you can use a CDROM to do the upgrade - however the "-iso" flag was not recognised in the "load" command shown in the guide. It comes back with an error saying there is no such flag. I ran "help load" and confirmed that "-iso" wasn't there as an option. So I used USB stick with cfe.bin in the root folder instead...
2. The USB stick needed to be plugged into a specific USB port in order to be recognised within CFE. The first USB port on the top of the X1000 Case doesn't work within CFE (works fine in AmigaOS4) - the second USB port works in CFE.
3. I had to find a USB stick less than 4Gb (I only have one - the Imation 512Mb worked) before I could successfully load the cfe.bin image without errors. I tried 3 different brand 4Gb USB sticks (San Disk, Toshiba and Lexar) and one 8Gb San Disk USB stick, all of which cfe recognised when plugged in, but none of which would load the cfe.bin image without errors.
Specifically, the error reported over and over while loading cfe.bin was something to do with fat >=2 , whatever that means! (sorry I don't remember the exact error message). I should mention that the load of cfe.bin from USB stick completed in all these error cases (which I guess means the usb file system was readable), but when I used spi to load the resultant firmware image and used the spi read command, the output result didn't match what the documentation said needed to be in the output, which means the upgrade didn't work. All these usb sticks work fine under Windows and Mac - I ran a Windows 7 scandisk on each of them after the problems but no errors were found. With a 512Mb USB stick the CFE.bin load worked fine, no errors during loading and SPI copy and SPI read command output was correct, as per the instructions.
In any case it is working for me now and the firmware applied successfully with the new boot screen on my X1000, but I wanted to make you aware of these problems in case something can be done in future to improve the process and support the CDROM upgrade option and higher capacity USB sticks.
Despite the problems I had, I do appreciate the work that went into making these updates - very much appreciated.
A question I had was in relation to the 2D Radeon HD graphic card drivers update for X1000 which I also installed today. Can someone please advise what changes or improvements we should expect to see as end users with the updated 2D Radeon HD driver on the X1000? From what I see so far I haven't noticed any difference in performance, but I am not sure what I should be looking for, or adjusting....eg. should video playback be smoother, or higher resolution hd video now plays back without issues? I tested Youtube playback in Timberwolf RC1 using the HTML5 trial and it still cuts the audio and video when playing back..
I assume that I also need to continue to use Wazp3d library in place of Warp3D on the X1000 until the HD 3D drivers are complete?
Catcha,
Epsilon
.