stanwebber wrote on 2022-04-23, 14:20:

do you know what 486 chipset was used in these models? i'm trying to find a compatible upper memory block manager which are chipset dependent. i looked at the versa p service manual and there is no shortage of chip numbers, but i can't expressly identify a 486 chipset.

PT86C868 & PT86C718 looks like the northbridge/southbridge combo. is this correct?

I'm honestly not quite sure, but I don't think so. The two chips you refer to are the PicoPower chips which I believe handle the APM functions on these laptops. I think the M/75 has similar or the same chips on the board. That said there's a small chance they could be. I think those chips were only employed on the M/75, M/100, and P/75 which were the only models that used the OP-570-4701 smart batteries. The Ultralite/E/V all had smaller eight pin ICs in the region near the on-board 4MB on the underside of the CPU Board. Those could be the memory controllers. I might have to dig through or post up some photos of my motherboards in high resolution possibly.

basically, the chipset auto-detect feature on all the umb managers (hiram, rdosumb, umb_drvr, uram) i've tried have failed. i'm hoping if i at least know the chipset family of the nec versa p, i might be able to manually force a similar chipset config.

the only other umb manager i could find is 'the last byte memory manager'. i haven't tried the chipset detection tool yet, but only the pt86c168 & pt86c268 chips are listed in the compatibility list.

pcmcia card services is forcing the issue. without them i'd have well north of 600k of conventional memory fully-loaded even in real mode.

stanwebber wrote on 2022-04-27, 03:55:

basically, the chipset auto-detect feature on all the umb managers (hiram, rdosumb, umb_drvr, uram) i've tried have failed. i'm hoping if i at least know the chipset family of the nec versa p, i might be able to manually force a similar chipset config.

the only other umb manager i could find is 'the last byte memory manager'. i haven't tried the chipset detection tool yet, but only the pt86c168 & pt86c268 chips are listed in the compatibility list.

pcmcia card services is forcing the issue. without them i'd have well north of 600k of conventional memory fully-loaded even in real mode.

Talking about this is giving me some insight onto a few things with my machines.....the P/75 and M/75 in particular, and all four in some other cases. Since I have some weirdnenss going on in some places that I've just chosen to live with...

- Loading the PCMCIA WiFi Cards using the non-card-services method (the drivers can control the chip directly to save RAM) causes the internal speaker to mute or stop working altogether until the next hard reboot.

- I've had an especially hard time getting Ultima VII to run in FreeDOS for some reason. I have about 645K free most of the time. Though this also just could be Himemx and/or Jemmx don't play ball with Voodoo (U7s own memory manager), at least not well.

- Seem to be seeing some oddness of this sort in Windows 3.1 on the M/75 as well regarding the DV Capture card I have not being detected by either FullTV and VersaVideo when in Windows 3.11 For Workgroups.

i ran the the last byte chipset detection tool, but i think it got confused since the tool predates the versa p by about 3yrs. it detected:

This computer has a 386sx or better processor.
CONFIG.SYS entries:
Device=HIMEM.SYS
Device=EMM386.EXE (or EMM386.SYS)
Device=LASTBYTE.SYS Physical=LIM4EMS [,NOEMS]
This device provides up to kbytes of upper memory.
This device does not support any PHYSICAL suboptions.

maybe your wifi card has an irq/dma conflict. use essconfig (at least on the p/75) to change the non-plug&play settings. the essconfig included in the ess688/968 driver package distributed on vogondrivers.com works both in interactive and command line mode. it can take upwards of 45sec running from autoexec.bat, but it does eventually complete.

i primarily use freedos as well, but only the tools paired with msdos 7.0 or 7.1. jemmex for sure won't play nice with ultima7. you could try himemx with msdos...i'm pretty sure i had it working on my athlon system with xmgr + umbpci + aweutil on msdos 7.1.

btw, here is a link to the win95 65545 video driver package i settled on. it seems to have the most functionality available, at least for external or combo video modes.
https://www.helpdrivers.com/video/Chips/65545_VL-ISA_Bus/

all of the umb managers out there are officially a bust on the versa p/75. since none are still in development the only hope is creating a custom .scr hiset.sys script for hiram.exe, but for that you need the northbridge datasheet. i can now confirm that the pico PT86C868 is the northbridge chip and pico PT86C718 the southbridge. the PT86C718 is more common, but i can't find datasheets online for either of them so i'm at a dead end otherwise.

also, i recently hooked up a gamepad via the parallel port and noticed the bios has the port set up on irq 7 which i thought was the default ess688 irq. win95's automatic config uses no irq for the parallel port and sets up the ess688 on irq5. there didn't seem to be any conflicts, but i went ahead and switched the parallel port to irq5 in the bios and disabled automatic configuration in win95 and manually set both irqs.

stanwebber wrote on 2022-05-09, 15:53:

all of the umb managers out there are officially a bust on the versa p/75. since none are still in development the only hope is creating a custom .scr hiset.sys script for hiram.exe, but for that you need the northbridge datasheet. i can now confirm that the pico PT86C868 is the northbridge chip and pico PT86C718 the southbridge. the PT86C718 is more common, but i can't find datasheets online for either of them so i'm at a dead end otherwise.

also, i recently hooked up a gamepad via the parallel port and noticed the bios has the port set up on irq 7 which i thought was the default ess688 irq. win95's automatic config uses no irq for the parallel port and sets up the ess688 on irq5. there didn't seem to be any conflicts, but i went ahead and switched the parallel port to irq5 in the bios and disabled automatic configuration in win95 and manually set both irqs.

Cool, I might have to look into that myself, this could even be the reason WSSXLAT.EXE is not working on the M/75 in pure DOS - could probably urge T7G and AD Cop to work that way under WSS or SoundBlaster emulation (WSS on the M/75 shows no IRQ, but works under IRQ7 with DMA3 sometimes and IRQ5 DMA 1 sometimes). Never tried a gamepad via Parallel but that sounds appealing to me since I do like to play emulators on my Versa a lot. I just moved my P/75 back to Windows 95 so that should be some fun.