EREBUS II firmware

[kppot]

Hello everyone,

Here’s the situation: I’ve got an Oric Atmos with a 2GB SD card, everything is packed with Erebus. There’s no ROM inside the Atmos itself, so only the Erebus one is relevant. Everything’s running smoothly.

I downloaded the updated firmware from here, hoping to get Erebus II:
https://forum.system-cfg.com/viewtopic.php?t=15138
and burned 27e512 chip, previous content of that chip was erased
I also bought a 16GB SD card filling it with the same games as my 2GB card.

However, the issue is that only the Atmos boots up just fine but when I type
CLOAD"" and press Enter, I either see "READING..." and it freezes indefinitely, or I just get a blank screen. This happens with both the 2GB and 16GB cards—no luck at all.

When I swap the old ROM back in and use the old SD card, everything works perfectly again.
I am missing something?
pls help!

[ibisum]

In general, using mega-large SD cards for the Oric means the card must be formatted to be compatible with filesystem module of the Erebus firmware...

Format the new SD card, but also change its Partition table, to the exact form of the working SD card.

You can find tools to inspect these details for most OS's, diskutil list && diskutil info on macOS, use fdisk on Linux, dunno about Windows ..

The partition table type has to be one the Erebus understands, and the safest filesystem to try to mount to 'test' would be FAT16, but I have had SD cards with exFAT work with my Erebus setup, although I found it easier to use the 4gb SD cards in lieu of the much bigger formats that are now available ..

My 'spidey' senses when this happens (I also have had SD card issues with Erebus) is that there is an assert happening in the partition-table identification/enumeration code, but .. might be wrong of course ..

EDIT: "2MB SD card" .. that is a mighty small card for modern Oric needs, but still enormous in a way.

[Vyper68]

As Ibisum said I am pretty sure Erebus expects a FAT16 filesystem on the SD card hence the 2GB limit. I didn't know about exFAT though. It's like my SMART card on the Speccy 48K has the same limitation ( or did ). You can fit all of the Oric's software library in 2GB anyway so using a bigger card seems a waste.
Plus there is always Loci these days if you absolutely have to have more storage ( shameless plug over )

[ibisum]

I didn't know about exFAT though.

I might've got this a bit mixed up, don't take my word for it that exFAT "works" - I had quite a jumble of SD cards in use when I had the Atmos on exhibit in the museum .. and multi-platform SD cards in the mix as well .. but either way yes, you don't need a gigantic SD card for Erebus. It'd take years to fill it with .TAP files .. and it can be cumbersome, too ..

Better to spend that SD card budget on a LOCI, which costs about as much as a large SD card, but gives your Oric USB capabilities .. and thus access to many different storage options, hardware-wise ..

[kppot]

In general, using mega-large SD cards for the Oric means the card must be formatted to be compatible with filesystem module of the Erebus firmware...

Format the new SD card, but also change its Partition table, to the exact form of the working SD card.

The idea of that "new" firmware is you may use whatever card you like regardless, fat16 or fat32
And since with new burned ROM Oric
1. Boots up
2. Doesnt read any card, fat16 or fat 32 (it does nor read the very same card as it does with old firmware) - the question still persists. And it is not something card related
Because old firmware is good with fat16 2Gb (thank you for noticing my error, it is 2Gb, not 2Mb but of course) while new one does not recognise any card, it simply hangs on "... reading"
So yeah