Launcher fails to load about two thirds of the time

[prurigro]

First, thank you for the awesome package!

So I've been running into an issue since I started using it, and I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere so it's possible it's something I've done, but I tested after deleting the config and it still happens...

First I load the core, and the startup menu appears with the 5 RAM choices. I'll choose one of the options and hit return, and then the splash screen for the launcher will appear. Sometimes the splash screen freezes during the animation, sometimes it finishes animating and the screen goes black with a cursor flashing in the top right corner, and sometimes the animation finishes and the launcher loads. The most frequent result is the animation freezing.

I'll "Reset and apply HDD" a few times and eventually get into the menu, and then everything works perfectly after that.

Pure DOS images have no issues (though there are no issues once you're in the launcher for the pack either), and I've tested my SDRAM to make sure there are no issues there. I've tried playing with tons of settings. Occasionally it'll start working perfectly every time after changing a particular setting or updating the pack, but once I shut the MiSTer down and boot it back up it'll start happening again.

I'm assuming it probably isn't super likely that someone would know exactly what's wrong here (unless this is an issue everyone hits), but if there's a way to get some output to see what's wrong I'd be happy to try debugging.

Thanks!

[flynnsbit]

Sounds power related. Where are the VHDs located? USB drive? If so, is it powered? If SDCard. then maybe a corrupt disk. You could disable the splash screen by renaming C:\LOGO.SYS to something else or quickly hitting ESC when you see the logo and see what is locking it up. Could be CTMouse and something funky with that. If you do the escape trick, tell me where it is stopping.

[prurigro]

Thanks for the quick response!

It's on an sdcard that I make semi-regularly backups of and have never had any complaints about corruption. Also, if it can get past that screen everything else is peachy, and if I boot regular DOS or hang out on the memory screen there's also no freezing.

I first deleted LOGO.SYS but that just replaced the boot screen with the windows 95 one haha. Your escape trick worked, and I filmed the screen using a high frame rate then converted the video into jpgs and pulled out the last useful frame. In this case however, every time it would end on a blinking cursor on the top left. Here's what it showed right before that:

I'm re-downloading the pack to drop onto the card again in case something within the image corrupted at one point and will report back.

[prurigro]

So I re-downloaded and re-installed the pack from scratch and deleted the AO486 configs. I didn't have the issue initially, though I did have that old bug where the games vhd wouldn't be seen the first run. I then ran the update script (which completed successfully) and now I'm seeing the same issue again.

[prurigro]

I just tested with no peripherals except the keyboard's dongle in case it was a power issue somehow and got the same lockup during the boot animation, so I don't think it's that.

[flynnsbit]

can you REM out the vmode 3 option in your AUTOEXEC.BAT? This line: https://github.com/flynnsbit/Top300_updates/blob/main/_C/AUTOEXEC.BAT#L57

You can try REMing out each line in common from the bottom up. Is it Misterfs? There were changes to misterfs and I haven't pushed the latest version to everyone yet as I am still working on the MyMenu integration.

[flynnsbit]

Also have you manually updated your boot0 and boot1 bios files to the very latest from the AO486 repo? You have to do that manually.

[prurigro]

Hey, so I wasn't completely sure what* you meant by remming vmode 3 out, I've been using linux since the 90s and was a kid when I was using DOS so I'm not as familiar with batch scripts :). That said, I'm still on 0.78 as per the updater and vmode 3 doesn't exist in the autoexec.bat, so I first tried adding it in the same spot, then I tried adding it with rem before. Neither seemed to have any noticeable effect (though I think I caught an error just before the launcher loaded).

I checked and the boot files are all up to date with the same checksums (I guess update_all managed to grab the latest ones after I deleted them to sync with the core update a few weeks ago).

Misterfs.exe did indeed change upstream and I haven't pulled that update in yet, but this issue has been happening since long before that update happened, and it does eventually start up.

After so much playing around I've noticed there's a pattern to how it all goes down-- after a cold boot, the core will first freeze during the loading screen, then after running Reset and apply HDD it'll freeze right after the loading screen, and finally after running Reset and apply HDD again it'll get into the menu, and after that I can get into the menu directly every time until I power off the unit and power it back on (it even continues working after a cold reset). I haven't tested doing a bunch of other things inbetween, but I'm wondering if there's some sort of disk cache issue happening here, where the menu expects to have all the data available more quickly than the sd card can send it at? It'd be odd because I'm using a reasonably fast SD card, but it's the only thing I can picture being the case and it might explain why other people aren't having the same issue (if their system can load data more quickly or something).

[prurigro]

I'm thinking maybe I should wait until v2.0 ships and see if it magically goes away? haha