Posted By
Krill
on 2011-10-20
02:14:15
|  Re: Please help testing: New loader release imminent
The assumed problem is with the drive-side watchdog IRQs. These are supposed to time out on single-sided communication break-ups, meaning they shall reset the drive if the computer is takingmuch too long to respond, which happens when it is reset or crashes unexpectedly.
I used a wrong timer-mode, which resulted in a mere 256-cycle time-out on real hardware while all emulators seem to run the time-out at the full 65536 cycles.
The result was that the drive decided to reset while the computer was in the midst of communication, and depending on where in the protocol the drive reset, the computer would do one of various things, including loading faulty data, crashing, freezing, or returning a device not present error.
Now, VICE/xplus4 suffers spurious VIA timer interrupts, which means the watchdog IRQ is triggered for no reason, producing the same results.
The watchdog can be disabled at the loader's compile time.
As it's still perfectly possible that real hardware will work just fine, i'm eagerly awaiting your test results... 
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