USIfAC II, technical problems & support [MERGED with Plus-related posts from original thread]

[unay]

I Wonder if ıts possible to make a save state on ulifac, like m4 board?

I have done this successfully on the USIFAC II by chaining my Multiface 2 onto the USIFAC and saving snapshots onto the emulated disk.

It works even better if you mount an empty disk and then load the game from a snapshot.

How do you chain both usifac and multiface ii?
Can you share photos?

[Mark_wllms]

I Wonder if ıts possible to make a save state on ulifac, like m4 board?

I have done this successfully on the USIFAC II by chaining my Multiface 2 onto the USIFAC and saving snapshots onto the emulated disk.

It works even better if you mount an empty disk and then load the game from a snapshot.

How do you chain both usifac and multiface ii?
Can you share photos?

Either way works: the MF2 has a through edge connector, to which I attach the U2. I also have my U2 on a through connector, so I can put the MF2 on the back.

[Vitop69]

Well john.
I'm not done climbing the mountain.
I use 2 old PCs. one with xp professional and the other xp home edition and a CPC6128 with the Ulifac II.

I have a PL2303TA usb to connect the PC to your ulifac II and also an Esp8266-Esp12 module.

When I enable Direct Mode on the CPC (|en or |en2) I can navigate on my HDD (only with speed of 9600bps), I can load small basic programs correctly, but if I launch a game it stops about halfway through the loading screen and I get this error message:
"Access violation at address 00648B20 in module AmstradUtilityII_old.exe. Read of address 00000000".

If I connect with wifi after the command |wf,1 I get the connection to the host, but immediately after I get the following error message:

"Access violation at address 74DC59BC in module RICHIED20.DLL. Read of address 00000061

It happens with both xp windows PCs.

I couldn't get out of it.
can you help me?

Thanks for your patience.

[ikonsgr]

@Vitop69  did you use the new windows utility? https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/93ta0tbkyhzx89cvenjgm/AmstradUtilityII.exe?rlkey=yi0iq04dz45w98jl71j7bq64d&dl=0

[Vitop69]

@Vitop69  did you use the new windows utility? https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/93ta0tbkyhzx89cvenjgm/AmstradUtilityII.exe?rlkey=yi0iq04dz45w98jl71j7bq64d&dl=0

Hi john, thanks for the reply. unfortunately I can't use the new utility because my pc are win32, your application is for win64.
the only way is to use the old utility.😪

[ikonsgr]

Hi john, thanks for the reply. unfortunately I can't use the new utility because my pc are win32, your application is for win64.
the only way is to use the old utility.😪

Both utilities are 32bit, i never used 64bit platform for compile.
 If you still have problems with the new utility, i suggest to try it  on newer windows version (7,8,10). This utility was first developed ~2019-2020, so it was first tested on windows 7 and then on windows 10, and worked ok. I don't recall if i ever tested on windows xp, and to be honest, never thought anyone would try it on ~25years old windows xp 

[RobertK]

Here's another happy ULIfAC user for more than a year now, and here's my report, better late than never.

Initially I couldn't get it to work, the CPC showed some weird behaviour when powering it up. So I asked John for help, and his immediate guess were corroded contacts on the CPC's edge connector. I first didn't believe that, because the contacts looked fine to me - well, sort of, because I didn't really know what they *should* look like...



Cleaning them with a rubber didn't help, so I used fine sandpaper. Here I had cleaned just four of them to show the difference:



And finally, it looked like this:



It still wasn't working, but the CPC's startup behaviour had changed a little, so I knew that I was on the right way.

So I took my multimeter and checked continuity between the ends of each contact. On most contacts, there was an immediate beep, but on some I had to touch the copper a few times to get continuity, so I knew that I had to revisit these. And after that, it was working, and I'm delighted with it!

There is only the small issue that with my particular CPC model I need to press the ULIfAC's reset button every time after powering up (cold-booting) the CPC, but I can live with that. According to John, this is "normal" behaviour for older 464 models from 1984.

[vasilisk]

You only used sandpaper? Which number?

[ivavilagu]

For ulifac users:

https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/applications/cpc-station-a-game-loader-for-ulifac/

[ikonsgr]

There is only the small issue that with my particular CPC model I need to press the ULIfAC's reset button every time after powering up (cold-booting) the CPC, but I can live with that. According to John, this is "normal" behaviour for older 464 models from 1984.

Just add a pullup resistor network on Amstrad's data bus and most probable this problem will be fixed too.

[RobertK]

You only used sandpaper? Which number?

Yes, but I don't remember and I can't find the rest of the sheet anymore. I think it was 1000? It was definitively some lower 4-digit value.

[RobertK]

There is only the small issue that with my particular CPC model I need to press the ULIfAC's reset button every time after powering up (cold-booting) the CPC, but I can live with that. According to John, this is "normal" behaviour for older 464 models from 1984.

Just add a pullup resistor network on Amstrad's data bus and most probable this problem will be fixed too.

That's great news, I will try that!

Just a dumb question: I have seen that there are "Parallel Connection" and "Star Connection" resistor networks available. Which type is supposed to be used here?

[ikonsgr]

AFAIK, there is only one type of network resistors, which is nothing more than a bunch of resistors having one side in common 
The actual code for the network needed is "A09-103": https://www.ebay.ie/sch/i.html?_nkw=A09-103+resistor&_sacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313
You can also ask for it ,as: "9pin 10k network resistor" which is practically the same.
This type of resistors are used mainly as "pull-ups" (or "pull-down") usually on data bus or address bus, where, instead of having many resistors that connect each data/address bus bit with power supply, you use these "multi pin strings" and save both money and space ;-)
network resistors come in countless variations, depending on the resistor value and the number of resistors.