Eep386 wrote on 2021-10-08, 19:44:
You can try running Speedsys 4.78. Though it doesn't always properly detect VGA card memory, it does so about 75% of the time.
After noticing that one of the VGA memory chips leg was bent and carefully adjusted it to fit again in the socket. I get result from Speedsys that there is now 512 KB of videoram. Like it's ignoring the permanently installed videoram on the motherboard.
So the question is, does it really use now only the added video memory or it's not just showing up correctly?
for example there is no change in Windows 3.11 in the amount of resolution options or is it just maxed out in the Cirrus Logic side already.
SetRes in windows shows maximum 800x600x256 and 1024x768x16.
Also I have also learned that memory in the machine is working perfectly. Weird stuff that happened before is gone, reason for that was the L2 cache being on the board and not properly configured with the jumpers.
FDD is still acting up, not updating contents of the A: drive after switching disks in DOS.
This works fine when installing DOS, but after install it just show the contents of the first disk and after swapping it only shows contents of the first disk inserted, workaround is power cycling the machine.
Funny enough that FDD works great in Windows.
Could this be some kind of DOS driver issue, is that even possible?
DDO with ontrack was not working very well with the CF card, CF IDE drive adapter combo that I have. The slow reboot time was fixed when normally partitioning with FDISK and then installing DOS to that.
Boot time to DOS is now 10-15 seconds compared to 15-30 minutes with Ontrack.
But this limits the size of the drive 504 MB. This seems to be very common issue, even when the bios can configure drive up to 8 GB, it is not actually working as that.
Solution for the drive size issue could be using XTIDE universal BIOS, but it's not very clear to me how this process works?
I have 3COM networking card with empty BIOS socket, that could be used to flash the BIOS on some EEPROM?
What kind of EEPROM chip do I need?
How can I know that BIOS is compatible with the motherboard that I have?
How is the new flashed BIOS used by the system? Does it replace the BIOS on motherboard, does it work somehow side by side with it, how do you configure it?
Or is it only flashed in DOS and then motherboards BIOS is replaced with the newly flashed EEPROM?
So much questions!! 😀