Re: How to get and validate DMA mode for disks in Windows 3.1?

Posted on 2024-02-28, 19:48

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Inexpensive IDE controllers were essentially pass through devices so adding busmaster circuitry to the IDE boards or hard drives would have likely caused the cost of the devices to go up by a larger percentage without a corresponding performance gain, especially when using a single tasking OS like …

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Re: How to get and validate DMA mode for disks in Windows 3.1?

Posted on 2024-02-28, 19:11

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

ISA "Third Party DMA" DMA was initially provided for hard drives but was quickly replaced by PIO because by the time the CPU's got to 8Mhz, the CPU could move data faster than the 8237 chips, PIO was easier to code, and there was rarely little real world multitasking benefit to third party DMA on …

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Re: 386 memory (?) issues

Posted on 2024-02-26, 08:03

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yep, that does look like a culprit indeed but I can't 100% guarantee that the leg was already broken and it did not happen during the extraction process..they were quite stuck, I used a chip extractor and had to apply non-trivial force to get them out but did it as cleanly as possible, but you …

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Re: How to get and validate DMA mode for disks in Windows 3.1?

Posted on 2024-02-26, 01:35

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

"DMA" is somewhat of an ambiguous term here The "DMA" checkbox on an IDE hard drive in Windows 95 OSR2 and later refers to the PCI IDE standard bus mastering standard described here and introduced in the Triton chipset: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2018/readings/hardware/IDE-BusMaster.pdf As …

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Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

Posted on 2024-02-22, 01:55

by

by jakethompson1

in Milliways

in Milliways

Maybe someday there will be a Windows 95/98/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/10/11 client as well so we can mount it and format it with the standard Windows utilities. Just a joke as that will never happen. :P Time to get the Windows device driver book out ... Kind of related, are there any programmers reading …

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Re: 486 board with UMC 8881E/8886B: The winner is: EDO without L2 (terms and conditions apply)

Posted on 2024-02-21, 19:02

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Would there be any reason to expect the SiS 496 to have much different performance in a cacheless+EDO DRAM configuration than the UM8881? I don't think so. I expect both chipsets to implement the same "industry standard" patterns to access EDO RAM. This also means you likely can use the publicly …

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Re: Can someone pleas confirm the cache chios capacity on thuis board..

Posted on 2024-02-21, 18:40

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

To me that points to a jumpering issue (most likely) and, less likely, a bad SRAM or a broken/scratched trace leading to some portion of the cache chips.

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Re: Can someone pleas confirm the cache chios capacity on thuis board..

Posted on 2024-02-21, 18:19

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

They are indeed 524,288-bit SRAMs which might ambiguously be called "512K" Four of them make 256KB cache. It takes a set of eight to make 512KB cache. Your board only supports single-banked cache (four sockets plus a tag RAM). Although there are PCI 486 boards that have eight sockets (double-banked …

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Re: 486 board with UMC 8881E/8886B: The winner is: EDO without L2 (terms and conditions apply)

Posted on 2024-02-21, 18:04

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Fascinating tests... So far I am finding PCI 8881E/8886B (HOT-433) a lot more stable than the VLB VL/I-486SV2GX4... That's comparing apples and oranges. The 8881E and 8886B are the last revision of the UMC 8881/8886 chipset, which is likely years newer than the SiS 471 on the VL/I-486SV2GX4. The …

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Re: Windows 3.1 / 9x games that require Quicktime

Posted on 2024-02-19, 00:01

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by jakethompson1

in Deep Thought

in Deep Thought

Zoo explorers and Oceans explorers from Compton's New Media. They are full quick time games Nice. Technically, I think they are Macromedia Director based, but use QuickTime for video clips. Those came along in a "Multimedia PC" bundle and I remember playing them. Body Works was another one if you …

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Re: Report: sii3114ctu with win9x

Posted on 2024-02-18, 23:41

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There are several versions of the BIOS option ROM/firmware for those cards floating around; try flashing a different one?

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Re: Need help with this socket 3 board

Posted on 2024-02-18, 23:26

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What speed are you using? Is the CPU overclocked?

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Re: INTERtan 286 cmos/bios loosing memory

Posted on 2024-02-18, 03:30

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Need a picture of the motherboard; it's possible you have a Dallas chip with the battery (safely) encased inside Lots of options on HDDs, the two best being just find another IDE HDD that is still working (of any capacity) or get a passive adapter to use a CompactFlash card.

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Re: ASM: Input interrupt not working until 386

Posted on 2024-02-16, 22:30

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You have illegal instructions for an 8086/80286, e.g. conditional jump with displacement outside of the range -128 to +127: 8d: 0f 84 e4 00 je 0x175 Doesn't look like fasm has a way to set cpu to 8086 or 286 like nasm You might also want to wrap that sound code messing with the 8254 inside a cli/sti

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Re: Compact Flash IDE interface - writing works, but reading doesn't

Posted on 2024-02-12, 06:12

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

douglar wrote on 2024-02-11, 18:44: jakethompson1 wrote on 2024-02-11, 17:20: This sounds like the bug in early AT BIOSes where IRQs get missed when reading multiple sectors because reading the status register (which clears pending IRQs) occurs at the wrong time Would Xtide Universal Bios fix that …

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Re: Compact Flash IDE interface - writing works, but reading doesn't

Posted on 2024-02-11, 17:20

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

This sounds like the bug in early AT BIOSes where IRQs get missed when reading multiple sectors because reading the status register (which clears pending IRQs) occurs at the wrong time

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Re: Windows 95 DOS Mode drivers

Posted on 2024-02-10, 20:59

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

The short answer is that in the simplest configuration, nothing should be in your config.sys except for the DEVICE[HIGH] statement for your CD-ROM driver, and nothing should be in autoexec.bat except environment variables (and doskey if you'd like). Put MSCDEX, mouse driver, and other TSRs in c:\ …

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Re: XTIDE ISA ADDRESS questions

Posted on 2024-02-10, 20:42

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by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was looking into that a while back as well: Re: How does ISA MEMCS16# work?

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Re: Biostar MB-8433UUD-A

Posted on 2024-02-07, 06:19

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I may remember incorrectly, but I sorta recall motherboard versions which were sold with a UV EPROM chip contained a BIOS revision which did not try to update ESCD information. Did you see Updating ESCD... with your BIOS before you flashed it? Or did this only happen after you flashed it? I'm …

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Re: Help to identify 386 motherboard

Posted on 2024-01-28, 04:20

by

by jakethompson1

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Looks like a different revision of the Chicony CH-386-20B https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/chicony-ch-386-20b Thank you for your quick reply! It seems like it might indeed be a different revision of the Chicony CH-386-20B motherboard. Jumper settings are likely to be the same across revisions …

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