Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
From: Adrian.Lawrence@comlab.oxford.ac.uk
Subject: B004 problems
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 14:17:30 GMT
Message-ID: <9401261417.AA00185@client26.comlab.ox.ac.uk>


|From: tshibata@jsk.t.u-tokyo.AC.JP (Tomohiro Shibata)
|Subject: Can B004 still work?

|I want to use B004 for my docking station(ISA*2,VL*2) of 486 DX2/66M
|Notebook. But I haven't succeeded yet (;;) Environment Variables are :
|	IBOARDSIZE=#200000
|	ICONDB=b004.dat
|	TRANSPUTER=b004
|ISPY4.EXE can see that link, but I can't boot it.

I use both the TDS3 (wonderful!) and the occam Toolset D7305A with a B004
on one of my machines. They both work fine. It is hard to fathom what
problems you might have without more details.

One possibility is the parity circuit: the B004 has a parity-checked memory
and the circuit will set ERROR if it detects a fault. But you must
explicitly write to every location in external memory to initialize the
parity field before use. This is best done at boot time by an
entry in AUTOEXEC.BAT (for MSDO*, etc).  The TDS3 comes with a program
for this purpose, but you can write you own fairly easily.

The early ISERVERS merely turned off the check circuit. The more recent
releases have removed this feature: don't ask me why.
 
Adrian Lawrence

Adrian@prg.oxford.ac.uk     adrian@vax.oxfords.ac.uk


 

