Alright. So, my 486 PC has an annoying issue, in that it needs XTIDE's Universal BIOS to work properly. I'd prefer to have my 8MB Rage II+DVD in it (all my other vintage PCs are ATI powered). However, for whatever reason, the ATI Bios is 40k instead of 32k (which is really annoying because they only use the first 8 bytes of the last 8K -- the rest is blank. Bastards).

I've got the ISA rom card from TexElec, and that only lets me put XTIDE at C800 or D000. Since ATI is stupid, C800 is occupied by 8 bytes of the video ROM, and CC00 isn't an option on the TexElec card. This forces me to use D000, and results in having only 56k contiguous upper memory, and thus no 64K window for EMS.

I'd _REALLY_ like to be able to put XT-IDE at CC00. I thought maybe a network card might let me do this, so I ordered some 8k (28C64) EEPROMs and tried to make that work -- but none of my ISA network cards work for various reasons. (Intel doesn't see the EEPROM, my realtek is stuck on interrupt 3 and causes the system to hang on boot, and my 3-com 3C515 doesn't seem to want to use the EEPROM either (it has a 32 pin socket instead of 28 pins). The MINI ISA ROM board someone has posted here does seem to do CC00 -- but it uses 128K EEPROMs -- so I think that uses up a whole bunch of space that I'd rather not.

So, how does it work? If I program an 8K rom onto a 128k EEPROM and order the stuff to make the MINI ISA ROM board will it only "use" 8k? I don't really understand how this would be possible since the EEPROM would be on the bus answering whenever the CPU polled that area of memory.

Is there a way to get my 8k EEPROM onto the ISA bus without all this hassle? I have an S3 Card that only has a 32k rom but it's only 4MB so it limits my resolution quite a lot (for windows).