MiSTer FPGA Forum

Juri wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 7:33 am

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 12:54 pm

Juri wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 9:41 am Hello i have a problem with the updater script, when i launch it it start downloading script version 0.8.15
Then it immediately download version 0.7.8
After this the update process begin and at the end it says:
Successfully updated to v.0.7.8
Why it do not update to v 0.8.15? What i'm doing wrong?

You are doing nothing wrong. There are multiple versions of multiple things being downloaded (both fastdoom. the update script, and all the pack changes from github.

So, how can i successfully update to v 0.8.15? Instead of doing no update to the very old version 0.7.8?
Thanks

You did, you are. Everything is fine. You don't need to do anything more...

There are lots of things going on in that script.
1. v.0.9 -- AO486_Update_Top300_Pack.sh -- Initial container script that downloads the real script from github allowing for updates to the real script. Some people don't like the fact that this downloads an extra script, but those people can not use this and create their own...
2. v.0.12 -- update/AO486_Update_Top300_updater.sh -- actual Top 300 updater script
3. v.0.7.8 -- update.zip -- the actual update pack that is extracting over C and E drives. https://github.com/flynnsbit/Top300_upd ... ag/v.0.7.8
4. v.0.8.15 -- FastDoom packs from the official repo for Doom, Doom II, and Ultimate Doom. --https://github.com/viti95/FastDoom/releases/tag/0.8.15

5. OPTIONAL -- v.2.0.0 -- https://github.com/flynnsbit/Top300_upd ... updater.sh Optional -- There is a pre-release update pack that will pull down 2.0 and change your interface to MyMenu, add screensavers, and probably break a few games. I haven't gotten back to going back through each game for this one. It will probably sit in pre-release for a while. If you don't know what you are doing, I wouldn't bother with this.

Point is, lots of versions and the hacked up script is just showing you the last "github pack" version from the last thing it downloaded. It's not a smart script but anyone can change and update it. Feel free.

I've been thinking about moving the AO486 back to a local SD card, because the filesystem access to a ZFS-based image is incredibly slow. I don't have an easy way to benchmark it, but copying even 100 megs would probably take hours.

ZFS is a resource hog. Where are you running that filesystem? A pi is probably underpowered for it, especially if you enable deduplication (don't do that!) but compression also takes quite a toll. I used to run it on an Atom-based NAS with only 4GB of RAM and it sort of worked for simple media streaming if I didn't use any of the fancier features. If all you want are snapshots then something simpler like ext4 layered on top of LVM should tick your boxes without overwhelming an underpowered Pi.

Bas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 6:36 am ZFS is a resource hog. Where are you running that filesystem?

Because I can actually trust it. ZFS is more reliable than any other filesystem I'm aware of. Because it never overwrites data, however, it can be slow with programs that write data chunks smaller than its blocksize. It has to read the whole block, replace the updated sector, and write the whole block again. This is, um, not ideal for an AO486 disk image. I could create a custom filesystem with smaller blocks, but it's probably easier to just stick the AO486 files on the SD card, because I'm not too worried about data loss.

A pi is probably underpowered for it, especially if you enable deduplication (don't do that!) but compression also takes quite a toll.

If you run the new standard compression, it should be fine on a Pi 4. Earlier Pis might not like it as much.

Pi 4s are pretty beefy. I would expect one to run ZFS adequately. Running encryption, however, is likely to be unusably slow.

In general, however, I agree with you that ZFS is probably better-suited for beefier hardware. I'm running mine on an older 4790K, and it's nicely performant. It'd probably be better to buy the cheapest AMD chip and motherboard you can find that support ECC RAM, however, and the AES New Instructions if you want to use encryption. The ZFS devs very strongly recommend running ECC if you really care about your data.

The AO486 disks are like ogres: they have layers. First there's the filesystem the core sees, probably FAT with an undetermined cluster size. Those clusters consist of 512 byte sectors that get fed to the ARM side of the MiSTer. That in turn uses Linux to manage the contents of a file that sits on an exFAT volume (SD) or something else that you connect over USB or even the network. We're in huge if/then/else territory now. A remote CIFS filesystem has its own block sizes for transfer across the network as well as locking semantics. At the remote end sits yet another OS with a kernel, caches, a filesystem driver and a physical medium that may even be striped RAID etc... It really is turtles all the way down. Each turtle makes promises regarding integrity of data when written but they don't know of each other. ZFS may be one heck of a big turtle but it won't save your AO486 disks if any of the others goes belly-up in some unexpected way and breaks its promise. Much of the time, the resulting behavior of the whole will be undefined.

TLDR: ZFS is not a silver bullet in this case and there's a lot of cranky, cantankerous tech sitting between AO486 and the physical bits written to your platters.

Far from an expert at this!
But from what i have read about ZFS on Pi´s (and yes even 4´s) and/or other lower end cpu/memory can cause corrupted ZFS pools quite easily.

And it has much too do with to little memory but some because slow cpu, and i assume ECC memory could probably have helped in some cases.

ZFS corruption under low intensity use cases is very rare, even on underpowered hardware. It'll probably just be slow unless you actually starve the system of RAM but that shouldn't really happen if you have over 4GB and no other workloads running. There's always the risk of an undetected bitflip if you don't have ECC RAM, but who has that at home right? Other filesystems are just as vulnerable to that all the way back to the beginning of time when Kernighan and Ritchie created the known universe. The ECC thing mainly applies if you have a zillion disks in your SAN and the probability of bit error increases because of that.

A Pi that's starved of RAM and dealing with a saturated system bus won't be a happy combination.

grizzly wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 2:36 pm Far from an expert at this!
But from what i have read about ZFS on Pi´s (and yes even 4´s) and/or other lower end cpu/memory can cause corrupted ZFS pools quite easily.

And it has much too do with to little memory but some because slow cpu, and i assume ECC memory could probably have helped in some cases.

Can't you enable the ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag if you don't have ECC?

8GB isn't enough memory?

8GB should be ok.

Hi, I'm new here. Firstly, thank you Flynn for your outstanding work on the Top 300 DOS Pack! For the last few days, I've been testing games, but I found that some don't seem to utilize the CD when needed and/or the music is missing or just weird beeps and boops. For instance, with Warcraft II Tides of Darkness, when I choose "Press 3 for WarCraft II: Battle Chest w/CD Music", the game asks me to insert the CD when playing single player even though wc2tod.cue is auto mounted to IDE 1-0. Then, if I choose to play with Sound Blaster, I can play single player, but the music is just weird distorted computer beeps and boops. Any idea how to fix this?

Vidarr2000 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 17, 2022 12:33 pm Any idea how to fix this?

Red Book audio is not currently supported on any of the computer cores...

Can anyone help. I have done a fresh install of the pack. But its not finding the CD versions of the games. I'm using a usb hard drive. I have deleted the contents of AO486 games folder on my SD card. So I want it to point to the external hard drive. All good, the updater works, the non cd games work. But it doesn't load up the CD versions? Any ideas please.
Ive put the pack and contents on the external into ----- games/AO486/

Shuffle7 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 6:43 pm Can anyone help. I have done a fresh install of the pack. But its not finding the CD versions of the games. I'm using a usb hard drive. I have deleted the contents of AO486 games folder on my SD card. So I want it to point to the external hard drive. All good, the updater works, the non cd games work. But it doesn't load up the CD versions? Any ideas please.
Ive put the pack and contents on the external into ----- games/AO486/

It should automatically load the images from within the emulator if they are in the cd folder under ao486.

Is /media/fat/games a symlink to the games directory on your USB HDD? I've never set up a USB HDD with MiSTer before so maybe someone else will have more insight.

Thanks for the reply. driving me nuts to be honest. This is my second attempt at getting this to work again (it used to be fine when i had all the pack on my SD card)
Im not sure what a symlink is.
this is the path: G:\games\AO486

my external drive is listed as G:\
the pack is in here, Top 300 cd folders etc etc

Shuffle7 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 7:24 pm Thanks for the reply. driving me nuts to be honest. This is my second attempt at getting this to work again (it used to be fine when i had all the pack on my SD card)
Im not sure what a symlink is.
this is the path: G:\games\AO486

my external drive is listed as G:\
the pack is in here, Top 300 cd folders etc etc

Did you leave another ao486 folder on your SD card. If you did, where ever the core loads the bios from is where it is going to try and find the cd folder. Could be the folder name (upper/lower case, etc). If you try to mount a cd manually from the menu does it drop you into the exact folder on your external drive or somewhere else. Thats a good way to test.

when launching Leisure Suit Larry 7 it complains about missing CD-ROM

it does both on the TOP300 pack and also on a favoruite compilation I did using exoconverter.

Any idea how to fix this? probably the .bat file has to me edited

I have been having strange problems for a while. I have it all installed and working. I want to add games manual and read somewhere that I put them in the shared directory, which worked for a while. After updating it no longer finds the files, I can see directories but not the files in the directories in shared. Its this way when I am using the manual add panel and when I go into dos. Again, directories are there but nothing is in the directory, yet SSH and Samba and SCP all show there are files.

Did something change and you can not add games this way? Where are the files for doom stored?

VGA Monitor is connected to an HDMI to VGA-Adapter.

300 Pack used to work fine, but out of the sudden I get no picture anymore as soon as the TDL starts up.

Dos is booting fine, ao486 boot screen is fine, but as soon as tdl starts, I can see on the monitor, that it tries to switch to a certain resolution, but it fails and stays black. When I press escape, picture is coming back.

I thought that tdl hast the same resolution as the dos prompt screen? Anything broken? Any Idea?

Does anyone have working audio in Dark Sun II?

HerrBerzerk wrote: ↑Mon Sep 12, 2022 5:32 pm VGA Monitor is connected to an HDMI to VGA-Adapter.

300 Pack used to work fine, but out of the sudden I get no picture anymore as soon as the TDL starts up.

Dos is booting fine, ao486 boot screen is fine, but as soon as tdl starts, I can see on the monitor, that it tries to switch to a certain resolution, but it fails and stays black. When I press escape, picture is coming back.

I thought that tdl hast the same resolution as the dos prompt screen? Anything broken? Any Idea?

I have the same issue. When I boot AO486 my VGA monitor flashes a few times and eventually sits at a blank screen. My workaround to bring it back to life is to switch the input on my monitor to something else then back again.

Love the pack, thank you so much for your hard work.

I'm trying to manually install a couple games. My problem is there's not enough space on the vhd for the 600mb Krondor requires. I've tried expanding with no luck and thought about making a new vhd but that looked tricky for a relative newb like myself. I think I'm just going to delete one of the larger games that I might not play but I can't see folder sizes without hovering over each folder individually and would rather avoid this if someone has a better solution.

Anyway any help would be appreciated, I love this pack

I ran into that issue. I saw that task was daunting as well. To get around that i did the following. Winscp the VHD to my Win10 computer. Installed VHDResizer: https://www.bursky.net/index.php/2013/0 ... olumesize/ (Requires 2x space as it copied the VHD contents to the new sized one it seemed)

Resized the VHD by 2GB. Then mounted the VHD in windows. For me I wanted to add master of magic. SO copied that over to the games folder(from an exoset) on the VHD. Copied the VHD back to via winscp. Ran the A0486 core select the last option and configured master of magic via the dos setup program so it had sound canvas for my mt32pi. Then restarted the core and ran option 1 extended and added it to the manually added games menu.

I do everything on my SD card in my mister so its all on that (256gb). 30 mins to copy the VHD back and forth. Not too terrible a process, imho.

kold666 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:46 am when launching Leisure Suit Larry 7 it complains about missing CD-ROM

it does both on the TOP300 pack and also on a favoruite compilation I did using exoconverter.

Any idea how to fix this? probably the .bat file has to me edited

I gave up using top300 for the time being, the dreaded missing cd issue

riblad_om wrote: ↑Fri Sep 16, 2022 1:44 pm Does anyone have working audio in Dark Sun II?

viewtopic.php?t=2189

Its CD audio so I don't think that works. No I do not get music. The sound FX works, but I exited the menu and went to the games\darksuni\ravageer folder and ran the sound_ds.exe and set the sound card to sound blaster regular. Good luck!

kold666 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 08, 2022 7:46 am when launching Leisure Suit Larry 7 it complains about missing CD-ROM

it does both on the TOP300 pack and also on a favoruite compilation I did using exoconverter.

Any idea how to fix this? probably the .bat file has to me edited

Works fine on mine. Make sure the CD image is mounted in the core menu under ide 1-0. If it is not mounted browse to see if you can find it. Good Luck.

Hi, I never managed to run One Must Fall. Other games such as Alone in the dark run nice using CDROM. The main problem with one must fall is the runtime error, it pops up sending me back to dos every time I choose a fighter/robot and the match is about to begin. Got the iso in the correct folder, all AO486 stuff are on external USB drive (but I also tried from main MicroSD). Sometime the runtime error corrupts the interface where I choose the games: the system hangs writing "preparing to launch" or something similar, then the runtime error happens. I've tried everything and I'm confused, since i know for sure that OMF works from the TOP 300 DOS Pack...

DanHero wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 8:10 am Hi, I never managed to run One Must Fall. Other games such as Alone in the dark run nice using CDROM. The main problem with one must fall is the runtime error, it pops up sending me back to dos every time I choose a fighter/robot and the match is about to begin. Got the iso in the correct folder, all AO486 stuff are on external USB drive (but I also tried from main MicroSD). Sometime the runtime error corrupts the interface where I choose the games: the system hangs writing "preparing to launch" or something similar, then the runtime error happens. I've tried everything and I'm confused, since i know for sure that OMF works from the TOP 300 DOS Pack...

IIRC you have to toggle L2 cache off to reliably run the game. This way the game loads the battles but runs a little slow unfortunately. Turning off the graphics options helps a little. I also found that sometimes when you turn back the L2 cache after the first battle has succesfully loaded you can run the game for some time without crashing.

Add me to the list of people who are out of space on their Top 300 A0486 VHD.

Tried VHDResizer which resized the volume but not the FAT32 partition with the games on it. If I were to go down the path of creating a new VHD of 24GB instead of 22GB as others have suggested, how do I get the two partitions in the same state as the original Top 300 VHD, where one drive is FAT and 10MB, and the other drive is FAT32 with 2 more gigs than I have now? Can you even format stuff in old school FAT in Windows 11? I did figure out how to create a new raw VHD in Disk Manager though.

Or if there's a way to resize the TOP300 FAT32 partition and give it the new 2GB I gave it with VHDResizer, that would work too ... but I haven't found a way to do that yet. Extend volume is grayed out in Disk Manager. I have an old licensed copy of EaseUS Partition Master (version 13 something), which allowed me to extend the VHD after mounting it in Windows. Mounts fine in Windows 11 and shows the correct new size, but when I transfer it back to the MiSTer I get a "sector not found reading drive E:" error. So whatever Partition Master is doing, MisTer ao486 DOS ain't liking it.

Edit: I found this post and this Youtube video by Flynn and just ended up creating a new VHD with some more space in Disk Manager in Windows 11. Then just copied the stuff from my existing Top 300 VHD into it. Mounted in MiSTer just fine.

virtuali wrote: ↑Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:46 pm

Hi guys, I'm new here and wanted to ask if anybody managed to run Falcon 3.0 without crashing.

I've seen flynnsbit video in which he tested it, but the problem is that he went only as far as reaching the main menu, which works just fine for me as well. The problem happens when entering flight: the program freezes after 10 seconds or so in flight, anybody managed to run ?

Falcon 3.0 is one of the few games that used an FPU. However, as far as I know, it's only used by the "hi-fidelity" flight model and, the manual says that, if no math coprocessor is found, the "complex" flight model will be used instead automatically, even if the you select high-fidelity, suggesting the game should run fine with no fpu.

Note that, the very same install folder works just fine with DosBox or PCEm ( I'm using the same VHDs as the Mister ), the crash seems to happen only on the Mister, do you have any ideas ?

I know this is a really late response, but I was exhibiting the same problem you were with Falcon 3.0 and was able to make it stop crashing by setting the graphic details to minimum. Setting them to medium, high & maximum would crash the game for me.

UScr00ge wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 7:49 pm

Add me to the list of people who are out of space on their Top 300 A0486 VHD.

Tried VHDResizer which resized the volume but not the FAT32 partition with the games on it. If I were to go down the path of creating a new VHD of 24GB instead of 22GB as others have suggested, how do I get the two partitions in the same state as the original Top 300 VHD, where one drive is FAT and 10MB, and the other drive is FAT32 with 2 more gigs than I have now? Can you even format stuff in old school FAT in Windows 11? I did figure out how to create a new raw VHD in Disk Manager though.

Or if there's a way to resize the TOP300 FAT32 partition and give it the new 2GB I gave it with VHDResizer, that would work too ... but I haven't found a way to do that yet. Extend volume is grayed out in Disk Manager. I have an old licensed copy of EaseUS Partition Master (version 13 something), which allowed me to extend the VHD after mounting it in Windows. Mounts fine in Windows 11 and shows the correct new size, but when I transfer it back to the MiSTer I get a "sector not found reading drive E:" error. So whatever Partition Master is doing, MisTer ao486 DOS ain't liking it.

top300drives.png

Edit: I found this post and this Youtube video by Flynn and just ended up creating a new VHD with some more space in Disk Manager in Windows 11. Then just copied the stuff from my existing Top 300 VHD into it. Mounted in MiSTer just fine.

Exactly what I was going to suggest. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best. you can also just go into the image (from within dos or mount the vhd in windows) and delete games that are either too large or don't run. running a utility like TreeSize against the E:\games directory will tell you the worst offenders. There are also files left over from the exoconverter that can be deleted, like scummvm folders and *.ogg files as those are not used in real dos but came over in the first version of the image.

E:\GAMES\PHANTASM\ is 2.6 GB alone, if you don't play that (or it doesn't work, I can't remember) then deltree that folder and you are golden.

if you remove a game, the update script wont bring it back, though it might push some scripts that I changed into the folders. If you are using the release version, TDL is still going to show the game in the game list, if you are using the pre-release version running MyMenu then the game will drop from the list.

Examples attached. Long story short, I should have cleaned it up more before releasing, and I should have left a couple more gigs for growth.