Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-26, 17:27

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As for Aspi - my SCSI drive has died (like lots of others before). I ordered a party of newer ones and will try them instead. Then I can tell more about Aspi7DOS.sys problem. Just a ping to you (by quoting you). The ASPI7DOS problem has been identified and fixed by now. Also, the BIOS patch before …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-25, 20:27

by

by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It appears to format just fine until the very end, after I enter the volume label it hangs with the drive LED stuck on. By the way, I found out when it does this it will eventually timeout (after like over a minute) and give this error. It's not a hard system lock, though the LED remains stuck on …

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Re: Setting Chinon FD-502 5.25 drive as B:

Posted on 2023-09-25, 20:11

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thanks for all suggestions, serting it at DS1 and opening TERM makes it run flawlessly as B: in the middle of the cablw but onky when there is an A: drive after the twist at the end! Very curious! "only whene there is an A: drive" is not that surprising: You need a drive to terminate the bus. So if …

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Re: Setting Chinon FD-502 5.25 drive as B:

Posted on 2023-09-25, 18:56

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have Chinon FD-502 that is content with running as A in the middle of a floppy cable but does not work as B on either position. Jumper settings are TERM Closed DS0 Closed DS1 Open DS2 Open DS3 Open That's actually a quite interesting scenario: The PC floppy drive systems uses a "twist" on the …

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Re: Tandon TM-100-2A floppy drive: head moves to track 39 (not 0!) and stays there

Posted on 2023-09-25, 17:42

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A floppy drive is not supposed to seek on its own. It should only seek when it receives pulses on the "STEP" line. If a drive moves the head either direction, it looks like the STEP signal is picking up noise (like 50/60/100/120 hz hum), and causes the drive to step at that rate. The "DIR" pin …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-25, 06:16

by

by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It appears to format just fine until the very end, after I enter the volume label it hangs with the drive LED stuck on. By the way, I found out when it does this it will eventually timeout (after like over a minute) and give this error. It's not a hard system lock, though the LED remains stuck on …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-24, 20:24

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The test I did with the 73GB drive was very simple yesterday. It was the sole drive connected to the system as ID0, booting from floppy. The system hung at the point in the DOS initialization (with the 73GB drive's access LED stuck on) where it reads the partition table of the hard disk(s) before …

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Re: Why did NES games generally look less pixelated/lo-fi than CGA/EGA PC games?

Posted on 2023-09-24, 19:30

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by mkarcher

in Milliways

in Milliways

Another reason may be the color palette. Especially the 4-color CGA palette(s) do not allow anything close to smooth color transition, so every color change is a sharp high-contrast edge. The NES allowed to choose from 55 colors . In 200-line mode, even EGA allowed only the 16 RGBI colors, which is …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-24, 18:03

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Perhaps that is only a display bug in this particular case, but it seems like too much of a coincidence. I'm guessing there is a similar truncation elsewhere in the code I made an updated BIOS (patch not yet upload to GitHub) that fixes the ID0 bug. It fixed the issue in the 9GB / 36GB combination: …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-24, 13:09

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It was jumpered as ID0, I even said so in the post you quoted :) Also you may remember from looking at the MBR sector that the only partition on the 73GB drive at the moment is type 6, CHS OK, it sounds like we are looking at two different issues then. I could reproduce the ID1 issues you had: I …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-24, 07:31

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

One more thing to note - the 73GB drive does NOT work even when it's the only drive in the system (ID0), booting from the floppy I found a bug in my code: It seems LBA calls for read, write, verify and seek are always sent to the drive with ID 0, no matter what drive is requested by the OS. This …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-23, 17:37

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It appears to be formatting correctly. OK, thanks for the tests. I'm going to re-review my patch whether I can find something that might mix up drive letters, or maybe I might even mess up some parts of the stack of the caller. There are two code-paths in the INT13 handler - one if EMM386 is loaded …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-09-22, 22:22

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Possibly creative intended to have some basic CSP program pre-loaded on CSP-equipped cards, but never went live with that feature. After looking at that program for some more time, it is obviously meant as diagnostic program, not as useful porgram to be used during normal card use. It can output a …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-09-22, 19:15

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I just checked my notes: I have a (approximate) ST19832 of the integrated CSP program, but I didn't completely analyze it yet. Possibly creative intended to have some basic CSP program pre-loaded on CSP-equipped cards, but never went live with that feature. Some comments in my disassembly indicate …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-09-22, 19:04

by

by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

About CSP/ASP - in 4.05 fw, in processing of command F8, one branch is never taken, and points to routine (addr 119A) what load array of 0x3BB bytes to x-port 0x83. Is it some loader of default ASP/CSP code ? Yes, X-Bus 80-83 is the CSP interface. These ports are located inside the CSP and are dead …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-22, 18:29

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Next, FORMAT D: resulted in this: {formatting 8GB} {8GB free} Odd, that is the exact size of my boot partition on the C drive... FDISK seems to think nothing is wrong though. OK, this narrows the problem down to the partition scanning code when the IO.SYS reads the drive partition tables on boot. …

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Re: The Soundblaster DSP project

Posted on 2023-09-22, 18:14

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

PS. There is undocumented DSP command for reading from any bus-interface port, 0xF9. >>[F9] >>[port number] <<[port data] And it counterpart, 0xFA for writing to port. >>[FA] >>[port number] >>[data to write] Nope, that's not the bus interface. F9/FA peeks/pokes the internal 256 byte RAM of the …

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Re: Help wanted --> ALI M1429/M1429G : Need peoples with M1429 board that have a BIOS for adult to dump chipset register

Posted on 2023-09-20, 21:32

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Could you point me to the proper tool to extract that? I am looking for the cache configuration for WT/WB I did download the same BIOS (atc 1762) and where only able to open it with modbin. There I can clearly see that in the setup it does have WT/WB configurations for internal and external caches. …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-20, 05:52

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My card came with BIOS version 1.1. There is no prompt to enter SCSISelect on the EISA card, perhaps it can be run from DEBUG but I dont know the offset (tried :6 and :9 neither did anything) Well, obviously it's been too long since I tampered with that card. In an EISA system, the configuration is …

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Re: Showing some love for Adaptec's ugly ducklings: Adding big drive support to EISA and VL controllers

Posted on 2023-09-19, 22:57

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Here is the entire MBR sector for your review. The partition table looks perfectly sane to me. Thanks. There is indeed just a single FAT16 partition using CHS adressing (type 6). Start CHS is 0/1/1, end CHS is 260/254/63. Start LBA is 63 (matches CHS @ 255/63), total size is 4192902 sectors (again …

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