First post, by olePigeon
I was wondering if anyone else out there has a Microsolutions CompatiCard I card. It's a 4 floppy disk controller.
It would appear that the driver is incompatible with Internal Cache Memory. I have an Intel Overdrive DX4-100 with a Joindata Systems G486SVL motherboard (AMI BIOS) with 256KB of cache installed. When I have the "Internal Cache Memory" enabled in BIOS and I attempt to access a floppy drive connected via my CompatiCard, I get a "DIVIDE OVERFLOW" error, then the machine hangs. When I reboot, I get a "FLOPPY CONTROLLER FAILURE" error.
If I go into BIOS and disable "Internal Cache Memory," everything works fine. I've verified this behavior with someone else that owns a card on an early Pentium machine (unfortunately for them, their BIOS doesn't let them disable the internal cache.)
I tried looking on Google for a solution, but I couldn't find anything. Best I could find was that the CompatiCard IV is incompatible with SMRTDRV 4.0 and to disable caching. Out of curiosity I tried disabling SMRTDRV, but it didn't change anyting.
Normally I wouldn't care, but disabling caching makes the machine run 1/2 as fast. It's really slow.
I'm hoping someone might be aware of a patch for the driver, or maybe 3rd party cache software that will give me back internal caching without having to enable it in BIOS. Preferably a driver patch, as that would help people with newer machines.
Otherwise I'll just have to disable the cache before using my 360k floppy or Gotek. Kind of a pain, but wouldn't mind not having to do that.
Thanks,
oP