Vridek wrote on 2022-12-09, 19:07:

I'm from Europe but you got some dumping prices. You don't have to pay duty and VAT?

Not sure actually how that works through eBay marketplace - I'll ship it anywhere as long as I can print a label for it. I believe that eBay also forces some extra stuff, like signature delivery, due to high cost of item.

Probably won't be getting to anywhere in Ukraine anytime soon. Other than that, I'd be more than happy to ship it to whomever will give it a good home.

NachtRave wrote on 2022-12-09, 23:56:

Vridek wrote on 2022-12-09, 19:07:

I'm from Europe but you got some dumping prices. You don't have to pay duty and VAT?

Not sure actually how that works through eBay marketplace - I'll ship it anywhere as long as I can print a label for it. I believe that eBay also forces some extra stuff, like signature delivery, due to high cost of item.

Probably won't be getting to anywhere in Ukraine anytime soon. Other than that, I'd be more than happy to ship it to whomever will give it a good home.

I think you're giving it away very cheaply. I've been buying these parts from places similar to yours. Vortex86 cost me 220USD + 100USD shipping + VAT on customs. I was buying 5 of them to make it worthwhile. Experience and technique for soldering. One spends a lot of time on this project. That's why I don't think selling under 800 USD is a good idea.

Vridek wrote on 2022-12-10, 10:12:

I think you're giving it away very cheaply. I've been buying these parts from places similar to yours. Vortex86 cost me 220USD + 100USD shipping + VAT on customs. I was buying 5 of them to make it worthwhile. Experience and technique for soldering. One spends a lot of time on this project. That's why I don't think selling under 800 USD is a good idea.

So in the cost analysis that we posted, if you are not building at scale you are going to get nailed with costs. Even at building 5 you simply haven't gotten deep enough into the curve to reduce costs.

By doing 10 at a time, we have been able to get from 690$ per unit down to 440$ per unit, a 250$ cost savings.

We plan on passing that savings by starting our bidding at 500$. There is actually already a bidder for SN11. I have SN15 on the table about to test.

The first of the third production run, SN15, is complete and will go live today on eBay at noon. This one is probably one of the best ones I’ve built. Exceptionally well made. Sometimes I impress myself.

Will be starting on SN16 today. Last v0.3 board I believe.

So, before I forget, I had some issues come up with some folk who reached out to me and figured to post here for asking the community for help.

1) Win 3.11 Video Drivers -> It would appear we don't have any and we're stuck in 256 color mode. Not exactly sure what could be done here, maybe there is a Tseng Labs ET4000 driver that can be modified to work with the XGI, albeit I have no idea how all that would work. Would be nice to find something that fixes the 256 color limitation on Win 3.11.

2) USB Floppy Malformed Data -> Seems that having a disk in a TEAC USB floppy drive upon boot or not messes with how the USB floppy device gets used. Any sort of commands like dir and such can output garbage in certain cases, maybe related to BIOS/OS fighting to handle such. Not exactly sure what the deal is here but worthy of further investigation.

3) BIOS Speed Dividers Hacking -> Since we have some discussion about BIOS hacking, I'd like to point out that if we could modify the BIOS, it might be worthwhile for us to get rid of the /2 /3 /4 /5 speed dividers, as they are not really used. If a game tolerates more than 100MHz (/8) then it seems to tolerate 800MHz every time. What would be nice instead is to use this divider table for other dividers that may be a bit more useful to us, like 33.333MHz (/24) and 66.667MHz (/12). We could probably do some of the lower 286 frequencies too, albeit I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out which ones would be most useful.

I know the XGI Volari architecture is based off of the SiS Xabre architecture (it could even be identical architecture as far as I know) If there is a Windows 3.1 driver for it I'd be very surprised.

You could give this Generic driver a go though - https://winworldpc.com/product/generic-svga-d … iver-windows-31

NachtRave wrote on 2022-12-11, 18:37:

2) USB Floppy Malformed Data -> Seems that having a disk in a TEAC USB floppy drive upon boot or not messes with how the USB floppy device gets used. Any sort of commands like dir and such can output garbage in certain cases, maybe related to BIOS/OS fighting to handle such. Not exactly sure what the deal is here but worthy of further investigation.

ICOP BIOS has integrated rom for floppy emulation via external SPI flash chip. This may mess things up.
Some other manufactures do make dedicated external floppy connector, but I think it's done using external SUPER I\O chip.
A couple of things could be tried:
1) Try to turn off external floppy emulation in BIOS (if available)
2) Try to reassign\swap USB floppy to another drive letter (again, if available in BIOS, idk which revision is used in icop module)
3) Try disabling default floppy IRQ or search for conflicts (Vortex86dx may use a lot of IRQs and DMA for serial\parallel\GPIO\UART functions. It's an industrial SoC, after all.)

NachtRave wrote on 2022-12-11, 18:37:

3) BIOS Speed Dividers Hacking -> Since we have some discussion about BIOS hacking, I'd like to point out that if we could modify the BIOS, it might be worthwhile for us to get rid of the /2 /3 /4 /5 speed dividers, as they are not really used. If a game tolerates more than 100MHz (/8) then it seems to tolerate 800MHz every time. What would be nice instead is to use this divider table for other dividers that may be a bit more useful to us, like 33.333MHz (/24) and 66.667MHz (/12). We could probably do some of the lower 286 frequencies too, albeit I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out which ones would be most useful.

Modifying the BIOS is pretty straightforward, as it's basically an AMIBIOS8 variant. Almost all standard AMI tools work (my personal exception being AMISCE, could not get it to work)
But custom dividers are not possible, i'm afraid. These come from predefined hardware PCI register A0H in north bridge bits 2-0 (3 bits, hence 8 values).

@Paul_V

Can you see anything with this BIOS ROM that might explain why the IDE controller misbehaves in 98SE?

Duffman wrote on 2022-12-12, 11:19:

@Paul_V

Can you see anything with this BIOS ROM that might explain why the IDE controller misbehaves in 98SE?

My guess it's hardware\driver related. Have not investigated much, as I'm using DOS exclusively with theese SoC's.
There's a mention of the CRC bug:
https://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/ … 10.3/01520.html

And some datasheets claim different controllers for different revisions:
"The difference between A9120 and A9121 are as below.
􀁺 Enhance the IDE compatibility, change from ITE821X (A9120) to general IDE (A9121)"

@Paul_V

It might also be IRQ related.
https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/linux-id … ling@gmail.com/

> [ 33.822836] ata2: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)
> [ 33.824367] ata2: drained 2048 bytes to clear DRQ

So you have a different problem - your IRQ delivery appears to be broken.

Thanks for replying - I forwarded that info. Also got SN16 up today.

Still waiting on my WeeCee. AusPost is slow.

My latest attempt at enabling 3D acceleration on the WeeCee, for anyone willing to try it.

https://ufile.io/clzj9hml

I do hope this one works.

I've got an ebox-3300 motherboard, which is Vortex86DX based and has SD card,CF and IDE44 slot.
I've tried installing Win98SE on different media. Here are some test results, should someone be interested:

1) SD Card - installed fine, but turns on compatibility-mode on firts boot. Exibits the same behaviour as the WeeCee. Code10 errors and stutters
2) CF card on primary IDE controller in CF slot. Same as #1 All is working fine on fresh install, until SD is enabled, see #5
3) CF card on secondary IDE controller in IDE44 slot through passive adapter. Sames as #1 All is working fine on fresh install, until SD is enabled, see #5
4) IDE SSD DOM on secondary controller in IDE44 slot. All is fine, no freezes during copy operation. See #5

Code10 error and freezes are basically related to OS being in compatibility mode. No hard drive is present in device manager while in that mode.

UPD:
5) Booting fresh and working Win98SE from IDE DOM or CF, while having SD card inserted and enabled results in blue screen on boot "Your multi 32-bit device bla-blah, will use legacy driver blah-blah".
After rebooting, I'm getting the same Code10 issue and freezes, while copying, even on IDE DOM without SD enabled. Hard drive is not present in device manager.
So, inserting and enabling SD basically broke perfectly working system after OS detected a child device using incompatible driver configuration. Reverting changes does not help.
Seems like a conflict between legacy and 32-bit drivers in Win98SE forcing the latter to boot in compatibility mode, preventing protected-mode drivers from being loaded. Win XP naturally won't have this problem.
TBPLUS driver has no effect.

UPD2: After windows has been rebooted in compatibility mode, driver reinstall and SD disabling will have no effect, always resulting in CODE10 and freezes.
IDK yet where exactly 98SE compatibility mode is enabled and if there's a way to prevent it from occurring.
After WIN98 enables compatibility mode, it adds NOIDE value to the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\IOS.
It needs to be deleted every time WIN98SE enters compatibility mode and requires a reinstall of the drivers afterwards.
The freezing is the result of a CPU going 100% usage, probably due to disk transfers being done in software layer in compatibility mode.

@Paul_V

Can you test rloew's TBPLUS driver? (he wrote this driver himself)
See if there is any change in the error message in device manager?

Do

INSTALL.BAT C:\WINDOWS

to install. then restart.

Duffman wrote on 2022-12-13, 13:55:

@Paul_V […]
Show full quote

@Paul_V

Can you test rloew's TBPLUS driver? (he wrote this driver himself)
See if there is any change in the error message in device manager?

Do

INSTALL.BAT C:\WINDOWS

to install. then restart.

I've tried it.

@Vridek

The HDD category is further down.
Scroll down please.

Duffman wrote on 2022-12-13, 15:21:

@Vridek

The HDD category is further down.
Scroll down please.

We can do this on Discord or WhatsApp so we don't burden the forum.

@Vridek

Thanks for the screenshots. It's a shame rloew's driver hasn't worked out.
I hope my WeeCee gets here soon, I really want to get to tinkering with this myself.

I may ask stupidly but Vortex86 would not support AGP port? Such external graphics 😀

@Vridek

I think the later model Vortex86DX3 has a spare PCI-E 1x lane that could be used for graphics.