feipoa wrote:

aries-mu.....

Wow Feipoa!! You're a gold mine of info! Thank you SO MUCH and my apologies for the delay in replying!

About the CD-ROM on a PCI Ultra ATA controller: I didn't know about that problem.
Have you ever tried those kind of alternative CD-ROM drivers for DOS? Like "SHSUCDX is the MSCDEX replacement from FreeDOS" and things like that?

I tried about a dozen DOS CD-ROM drivers. I think I also tried some stuff from FreeDOS. No go. It became an issue with some DOS games were wanting to verify the CD to load the game.

The problem is that none of the PCI cards put their IDE controllers (if they're compatible with standard IDE) to normal IDE ports' IO addresses and all the CD-ROM drivers just aren't gonna be able to find those ports and talk to whatever devices are attached. I recall some card actually having IDE compatible controller and if you talked to it directly you could get responses just like normal IDE. I no longer remember if it was my Promise Fasttrak66/Ultra66, SIL3112 or an ALI based card. It should be possible to hack a CD-ROM driver to just do its talking on the new addresses and get things working with such a card.
On Windows it no longer matters, there's a standard driver interface that upper layers talk to which allows things to work.

Tiido wrote:

It should be possible to hack a CD-ROM driver to just do its talking on the new addresses and get things working with such a card.

How would you even do that? Where would you start?
How I wish I was able to do these things. Like, who writes drivers? I have a piece of hardware on one side and an operating system on the other side. How do I write/hack a driver?
Is that a programming language, or what?

Hex editor, maybe a disassembler and/or a debugger, lots of knowledge about the hardware, how to program the hardware and x86 assembly programming in general. If you know what to look for and things work as expected it can be something along the lines of trivial but more often it is not 🤣.

Most motherboards will run with a 40 MHz PCI bus just fine, minus the onboard IDE

So far I had no trouble with integrated IDE on my SIS boards.

I've noticed that some SiS-based boards use an external IC fo the IDE, while some of the newer ones used the onboard SiS IDE controller.

My only recent experimentation showed issues with the UMC UM8881/8886-based IDE controller at 40 MHz.

Tiido wrote:

Hex editor, maybe a disassembler and/or a debugger, lots of knowledge about the hardware, how to program the hardware and x86 assembly programming in general. If you know what to look for and things work as expected it can be something along the lines of trivial but more often it is not 🤣.

Interesting! Thanks Tiido! I remember I had a HexEdit.exe utility under DOS more than 20 years ago... more I don't know, hope I'll have time to learn (but I doubt it 🤣).

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Most motherboards will run with a 40 MHz PCI bus just fine, minus the onboard IDE

So far I had no trouble with integrated IDE on my SIS boards.

Rider, I assume you have a 40 MHz-bus CPU then. Right? How do you know your integrated IDE is running at 40 MHz and not at 27 MHz?

feipoa wrote:

I've noticed that some SiS-based boards use an external IC fo the IDE, while some of the newer ones used the onboard SiS IDE controller.
My only recent experimentation showed issues with the UMC UM8881/8886-based IDE controller at 40 MHz.

IC stands for?
Thanks

How do you know your integrated IDE is running at 40 MHz and not at 27 MHz?

For example Luckystar LS486E has specific jumper for 1:1 PCI bus.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

How do you know your integrated IDE is running at 40 MHz and not at 27 MHz?

For example Luckystar LS486E has specific jumper for 1:1 PCI bus.

I see! Thanks!!

feipoa wrote:

If anyone knows of PCI Ultra 33/66/100 IDE controller which allows for DOS CD-ROM access and/or CD-ROM bootability, please let me know.

Hello feipoa, the SiI3112 SATALink 2-Port IDE PCI Host Controller is one such beast. Flashed with the non-RAID BIOS.
It comes with its own DOS drivers (works ironically better without them for for me) for DMA-mode DISK access and a separate CD-ROM driver.
I will admit to never having tried the CD-ROM driver though, but I do have it if anyone needs it, as well as the RAID and non-RAID BIOSes.

Oh and I forgot to mention, its slow as ballz, but compatible with every compact flash and ide drive I threw at it. I cannot say the same for onboard ALi, VIA or even Promise IDE ATA 100 controller cards.

tpowell.ca wrote:

Oh and I forgot to mention, its slow as ballz, but compatible with every compact flash and ide drive I threw at it. I cannot say the same for onboard ALi, VIA or even Promise IDE ATA 100 controller cards.

OMGOSH this hurts me! As I was definitely looking forward to hook an ultra fast (UDMA7) SanDisk CF card to the Promise ATA 100 !!!

Weird, for what I know, differently from IDE to SD Cards converters, the IDE to CF adapters do not need any electronic control processors as the CF cards are actually IDE devices. The adapters just adapt the IDE connector to the CF card connector. Why wouldn't they work with the Promise card?

aries-mu wrote:

OMGOSH this hurts me! As I was definitely looking forward to hook an ultra fast (UDMA7) SanDisk CF card to the Promise ATA 100 !!!

Weird, for what I know, differently from IDE to SD Cards converters, the IDE to CF adapters do not need any electronic control processors as the CF cards are actually IDE devices. The adapters just adapt the IDE connector to the CF card connector. Why wouldn't they work with the Promise card?

Compact Flash card manufacturers did not always implement DMA modes properly (and in some cases, not at all), nor are they compatible with some of the tight timing parameters used by some controller cards.
So far I've had great results with Sandisk cards, but Lexar Professional cards has been very problematic on anything but the Sil3112.

When I say slow as ballz, I'm talking transfer rates in DOS of maybe ~4-6MB/s read.
For a 486, this is plenty fast. For an AMD k6-III at 500Mhz running Windows 98... not so much.

In your case, the Sil3112 is worth trying. The card is cheap as chips (as Phil would say), and very tolerant of different BUS speeds and a wide range of CF cards.
I use it as my fallback card. It always works.

tpowell.ca wrote:

In your case, the Sil3112 is worth trying. The card is cheap as chips (as Phil would say), and very tolerant of different BUS speeds and a wide range of CF cards.
I use it as my fallback card. It always works.

Thanks so much!!

Well, the whole purpose is to push speed as much as possible... that would defeat the point... but good to know in case needs will change!