fx-9860gii-2 brief introduction

[Mjim]

ftune3 uses slower BFC clock (59MHz instead of 118MHz in ftune2) on the highest 'F5' setting. I'm actually a bit lost about what the differences are between ftune2 & ftune3 (apart from different default timings at maximum) as both are supposed to be for the SH4A fx-9860g2. Even after doing a full reset and removing all of the add-in apps (including ftune), it still seems to take 52 seconds.

In any case I discovered ftune2 isn't stable on my calculator with the default F5 settings. I'm hoping the cause was due to increasing temperatures (Southern Hemisphere), as I had a lot of stability problems with reboots clearing the contents of the RAM. The fact it was perfectly fine after posting my results and then a couple of days later having lots of issues was alarming (especially in context with what I have heard about some earlier Prizm CG-10 models).

After switching to ftune3 the stability returned but I would still get these occasional pauses when registering input commands, but no crashing even with rather intense benchmarks (for example in C.Basic I use the sequence function with a formula to build a table of 15,000 values to fill the 250k of RAM, which seemed to trigger a crash on ftune2).

I have changed the PFC bus speed back to it's default of 14.75MHz as it doesn't seem to make too much of a difference in results, and from Ptune's included text document seems to have an effect on the flash memory (I have no idea whether it is directly controlling the flash speed). The flash memory chip datasheet seems to list 60ns access times which corresponds to about 17MHz, so I'm keeping it at 14.75MHz to see if those occasional pauses/stutters go away.

EDIT: It's Flash chip is 70ns (14.3MHz), not 60ns. My older SH3 fx-9750G2 spansion flash chip was 60ns access surprisingly despite being on an older process node (0.13um), also faster to program from the specs(11us/word vs 3us/word). Standby current is significantly better in the old chip as well..(0.2uA vs 5uA). I'm going to miss that old reliable SH3 fx-9750G2.