Re: Options for hooking up a CF card to an 286 with a very old bios

Posted on 2025-06-12, 01:08

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Also, speaking under correction here, but since you bring it up, the AT BIOS specifies the geometry of the disk into the controller on each boot. For IDE/CF disks, and with no LBA support, you can use any geometry you want, so long as you don't exceed the total size of the disk. Because the geometry …

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Re: Options for hooking up a CF card to an 286 with a very old bios

Posted on 2025-06-12, 00:53

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Weird things happen... the card IS recognized, albeit with the incorrect CHS setup. I can partition with FDISK, format, even copy files to the card, but copying stuff from the card, or executing, hangs the system. I'm positive the issue is this mismatch between what the bios can read and how the …

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Re: IDE drives not being seen

Posted on 2025-06-09, 20:15

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The BIOS size limit discussion is certainly helpful once the IDE interface is working, but seems the OP tried several sub-32GB (and even sub-8GB) drives and none were even detected. My understanding is that only the 32GB limit is a hard-limit (in which you can't just ignore the excess capacity) and …

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Re: SPRING CIRCLE COMPUTER, INC. SS486 REV. P2C mobo and L2 cache problem

Posted on 2025-06-09, 18:31

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As a quick test you could temporarily pull one cache chip (making sure it's facing the right way when you put it back, of course) and see if it still reports 256K; if so, it's a fake cache board. The cache size jumpers just reallocate address bits between the tag and address lines going to the data …

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Re: IDE drives not being seen

Posted on 2025-06-09, 01:28

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I see, so at least it isn't that the primary IDE is fried.

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Re: IDE drives not being seen

Posted on 2025-06-09, 01:05

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So you're saying that the primary IDE interface can talk to CD-ROMs but doesn't detect HDDs? Or the CD-ROM is on secondary?

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Re: Choice of sound card in a 486DX2

Posted on 2025-06-08, 04:04

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I found a lot of Maxis titles in Win3.11 to GPF after installing the YMF719 driver; never to the bottom of that, could just be my configuration

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Re: UMC UM498 chipset and ISAPNP cards

Posted on 2025-06-06, 02:54

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't mean through the BIOS, but that there is some hardware issue preventing unisound, pnpdump, Win95, etc. from being able to enumerate the cards.

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UMC UM498 chipset and ISAPNP cards

Posted on 2025-06-06, 01:49

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Has anyone else noticed that on 486 boards using the UM498 chipset, utilities including pnpdump, Windows 95, are unable to detect ISA Plug and Play cards? It's as if something about this chipset interferes with the algorithm for waking up an ISAPNP card.

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Re: Help a noob with installing WIN95 OSR, Please!

Posted on 2025-06-05, 02:48

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Are you sure that the CD-ROM drive works on another machine? Those not ready messages would mean no disc is in the drive. It could also indicate a problem with the laser, or a worn/broken belt, such that when the tray closes, the disc inside isn't getting lifted into place any more.

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Re: CF and SD with larger ATA block transfer sizes

Posted on 2025-06-04, 20:07

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was hoping to find fast flash drives with multi sector transfer capabilities but as these don’t seem to really exist I have to stop it here unfortunately :( My hope is that as ZuluIDE continues to develop, this will be something that can be easily added to the firmware for the disk drive support …

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Re: Where to connect external battery to Shuttle HOT 409 v2.2 MoBo?

Posted on 2025-06-04, 19:58

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My experience is that the external battery header is a four-pin header, but with only pins 1 and 4 populated. So you take the jumper cap off and connect your external battery to those pins. One of my boards has the same setup as yours, where the ext battery header doubles as an "enable internal …

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Re: CF and SD with larger ATA block transfer sizes

Posted on 2025-06-04, 19:54

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Not in my experience and I suspect it's because by the time SSD firmware was being written, they only needed bare bones PIO support, since it would be only used by things like the BIOS and bootloader before getting a full OS running with UDMA support.

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Re: CF and SD with larger ATA block transfer sizes

Posted on 2025-06-04, 19:36

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A spinny SATA drive through an IDE converter, when it works, can do better on some benchmarks due to multi-sector transfers. And it's not like they make much noise. If a 1TB one is so large that it hangs your Award BIOS for example, you can set a Host Protected Area on another machine to simulate …

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Re: CF and SD with larger ATA block transfer sizes

Posted on 2025-06-04, 17:29

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I assume you're referring to supporting more than one sector per interrupt in PIO mode. I haven't seen one that supports it. Given those huge sizes (128KB and 32MB) those almost certainly are referring to UDMA transfers, so it doesn't sound relevant to what you're asking here.

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Re: Requesting info and assistance on this VLB motherboard

Posted on 2025-06-04, 00:19

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You may also want to rule out that the L1 WB support might not be wired correctly. For example, my 4DMS-HL3G needs this modification for an Am5x86 to correctly work in WB mode. Certain pins had the Pentium OverDrive version correctly connected to the chipset and/or jumpers, but not the 486 …

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Re: DMA option missing for hard disk

Posted on 2025-06-02, 20:40

by

by jakethompson1

in Windows

in Windows

It's still running the standard driver. Int13 = Bios mode ie "hi bios, I want to read some stuff" Not, "Hi hdd, I want to read some stuff" Apply the driver to the ide CONTROLLER While "16-bit disk access" aka real mode driver is a thing and is displayed elsewhere in My Computer->Properties, I don't …

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Re: New Computer Store in Silicon Valley

Posted on 2025-06-01, 03:31

by

by jakethompson1

in Milliways

in Milliways

Great news. Micro Center seems to have really stepped up to the plate in recent years as the last of the irl electronics store chains. It's invaluable when you're working on a project to be able to run down to the store and grab what you need. I used to live in the Denver area and frequented the …

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Re: MartyPC

Posted on 2025-05-28, 22:56

by

by jakethompson1

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

so it's not possible to build a PC compatible using a 80186 This isn't quite true and although it doesn't make a lot of sense there is one real example of it, the Triumph-Adler P50. I think the point is that one would have to disable the onboard peripherals on the 186, then duplicate their …

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Re: VIA VT6421A on 430TX chipset?

Posted on 2025-05-27, 20:19

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

XCDROM and the other ATAPI CDROM drivers in FreeDOS can sometimes find PATA/SATA CDROM drives on nonstandard I/O ports by looking through PCI configuration space for them

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