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Unisys Aquanta DL / ACER V56LS / ALi Aladdin IV+/ XT PRO chipset drivers

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First post, by Hezus

Posted on 
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Hi there,

I'm fixing up a Unisys Aquanta DL system (it's been stripped and beaten badly.. poor thing) and I've got most of it up and running. Windows 98SE seems to detect the chipset CPU-PCI and PCI-ISA just fine. However, I'm not able to get USB working.

This system is a Pentium 200MMX on a Socket 7 motherboard (ACER V56LS) which uses the ALi Aladdin 4 (IV) chipset. This was also rebranded as TX PRO.

According to this source, the chipset was also used on several PC CHIPS and Amptron motherboards. Maybe if someone has a USB driver for those, I could use them for my Aquanta DL.

  • PCChips M560 (Amptron PM8500)
  • M560TG
  • M565
  • M575 (Ability MB-586TXA1, “Top Gun”)
  • Amptron PM9600

Any help would be greatly appeciated! 😀

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Reply 1 of 1, by Hezus

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Took me quite a bit of tinkering but I figured it out. Leaving this info here for future reference:

The Aquanta Bios has several hidden options, so you have to change the JP3 jumper to revert to the OEM (Acer) Bios. Now here you can enable the USB Controller. However, the system crashed at boot when I tried this, so I went through the BIOS and disabled all other I/O features (PCI, Com ports, etc) and set the IDE controller to 'Both'. This time it booted fine (I reenabled stuff like PCI slots after without a problem).

Windows 98 SE will detect the chipsets and install default drivers. If you try to put a USB device in the port, the system will hang up on 'msgsrv32'. It seems the default drivers arn't sufficient to make it function fully. I've looked everywhere but couldn't find newer versions of this driver. So as a last resort, I tried the USB Enhanced Host Controller Driver V1.59 (for USB 2.0 chipsets and cards) and suddenly it worked! It could detect hardware! File can be found in the attachment.

To make USB storage drives function, I used the nusb36e package .

Let's hope this information helps someone else somewhere in the future 😀

Attachments

  • Filename
    EHCI_159.zip
    File size
    2.93 MiB
    Downloads
    51 downloads
    File comment
    ALi USB Enhanced Host Controller Driver V1.59
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

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