Sphere478 wrote on 2022-06-05, 04:18:
Hmmm, yeah that’s kinda limiting.
I have an idea,
What about a soundblaster, plug the compact flash into the soundblaster ide, and try using plop to boot to it from another device like gotek, flopy, cd or a second cf on primary ide
That's really interesting, I didn't know about plop and never though to try and connect it to my Vibra16 interface. I do have a Gotek (with FF) installed on this machine... but I think this would be a last resort especially since booting would be painfully slow on an otherwise beast of a 486 system. I still think XTIDE is the best alternative to using the onboard controller... I read up on my particular XTIDE board and it has a high performance mode, but it requires the rom to be flashed to enable that and I'm skeptical how fast an 8bit card can be... my guess is it's less compatible and marginally faster, but I need to try it out to see. I really want to get a rom flasher before I start messing stuff up with my working XTIDE, so I'm waiting for one to arrive from ali express. I also prefer to flash a rom on a NIC card approach for this particular machine and see how that goes (way cheaper than buying an XTIDE card). I've pretty much given up on the existing bios as I've literally toggled every relevant setting in the bios.
Anyway, thanks for even more info to consider, I learned a ton in this thread.