Software Problems

This section will try to describe solutions for the most common software
problems encountered with the GG2 Bus+ board.

Here is a list of potential problems:


*	"ShowSerial" reports incorrect serial port information.

*	The serial or parallel ports do not seem to work. 

*	I see nothing or garbage in the buffer memory of my video 
	or ethernet board.


If this sounds like your problem, first check that Enforcer is running
if you have a 68020/030/040 CPU.  As discussed in the install procedures
for the  A2000/A2500 , the  A3000 , and the  A4000 Systems , Enforcer turns
off the data cache when accessing the GG2 Bus+ board.



If you are running the program "SKsh", you must disable the "jm" or
"Job Manager" task.  Due to a bug in this program, accesses to 
"ibmser.device" do not work correctly when "Job Manager" is running.

The above can also be caused by bus access difficulties between the
GG2 Bus+ board and your PC plug-in card.  PC plug-in cards are 
frequently designed to operate with quite slow PC busses, and they 
often cannot handle the higher-speed reads and writes of the Amiga 
Zorro II bus.  The solution is to slow down the Amiga bus slightly 
by turning on wait state support. As described under Wait States below,
in addition to allowing true PC wait states to be processed, turning on
wait states stretches the Amiga bus cycle slightly to accommodate 
slower boards.


*	The serial or parallel ports output garbage or lose characters

This can be caused by the same problems as above, or some difficulties between
the Amiga and the GG2 Bus+ board.  If you have an Amiga 2000 and are using an 
accelerator card, you will probably need to turn on wait states.   Accelerator
cards use slightly shorter bus cycles that are too fast for many PC plug-in 
cards.  Stretching the Amiga bus cycle slightly using the wait states option 
should solve the problem.

In addition, many DMA hard disk controllers tend to occupy the Zorro
bus for long times during disk accesses.  This can cause character loss at
high serial data rates.  Aside from buying a faster computer, there are 
three possible solutions:  first, you 
can contact your disk controller manufacturer and see if there is a fix for
the problem.  Second, you can buy a fancier serial port card or internal
modem that includes a data buffer in its UART interface, such as a card 
with "16550 compatibility".  You can also replace any 16450 chips on your 
serial card with the fancier 16550 chip that is widely available.  Third, 
you can simply download data to your RAM disk and refrain from making hard 
disk accesses while using the serial port.


"I found a bug." 

If you think you want to make a bug report please give us the following 
information:

- What computer type do you have? (A500, A2000, ...) 

- What software did you use? (AmiTCP, ...)

- What exactly happened? 

- What did you expect to happen?

- Why do you call that a bug?

- Can you reproduce the bug?


For bugs related to any Ethernet drivers, please contact  Carsten Heyl .

For assistance with bugs in the remainder of the GG2 Bus+ software package,
please contact  Ethan Dicks  at  Software Results Enterprises .

We are very interested in meeting our customers needs.  If you have a
question, request or suggestion, please feel free to drop us a note.
We appreciate your help in this.  E-mail is the preferred method of contact,
so that we can reply to everyone and still have time to improve the product.