have you tried changing some shadow ram option, and isa clock setting or ws?

I changed adaptor rom shadow f000,64k to disabled and it all works 😀

Now in msdos land I have some different issues It seems that msdos hangs at Starting MS-DOS... when I use some cards like various sound cards and the high speed serial cards I wanted to use because the serial port on the disk controller only gives me 9600 baud on interlnk which is a bit slow.

Unless I'm just doing something totally wrong with IRQs and stuff? Since I normally play with 95 or higher I guess.

check your cards one by one irq wise.
dou you have multiple pnp cards?
what about the slow serial 9600 it seems low even for a 16450, what uart you got on the multi io card?

why not use parallel port port interlink, the use for games and serial should have enough for 9600 communication.

> 1792KB RAM

Could be bad memory. Does DOS boot with your 2 SIMMs 256KB?

If i disable video rom shadow c000,32k then I get the expected 2048KB RAM. I belive DOS 6.22 didn't boot from 512KB RAM. MSDOS 3.2 booted from my 5¼ floppy disk but I'm guessing it only supports FAT12 not FAT16 and I'm trying to use a 1.2GB hdd partioned to 500mb currently. (I do have an 80mb disk but it didn't seem to boot from it when I tried using the cylinder info I found at computerhope.com)

I know the SB Vibra 16 CT2960 is PnP. I was thinking about a PnP SB32. I've got a winbound isa nic of some sort (presumably NE2000 compatable) a UMC SuperVGA UMC85C408 Card.

This is the disk controller http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy- … E-2C-MKIII.html

I will have to try parallel I didn't realise I could use interlink with parallel.

I guess the problem is sometimes MS-DOS starts and sometimes it hangs or gets divide overflow. I could try reinstalling I suppose.

My ultimate goal is to use ethernet but apparnetly it gets CRC errors when it extracts even when I copied it onto the hdd instead of trying to use dodgy 3½ floppies

Oh and I seem to be having a graphical problem in that some games don't display properly like the initial screen and menu screen all look wrong and corrupted the game is fine I think though. The display type is set to VGA/PGA/EGA which sounds right to me although I don't know what PGA is. The same thing seemed to happen with a different video card.

Just updating where I am.

Interlink was running at 9600 baud because I was being lazy and used virtualbox for one end and it forces it to run at 9600 baud ignoring the settings of the host (apparently by design unfortunately) but it works at full speed when I use my 98se box.

The graphical problems (testing with dark ages 1) happen when using the hdd will get corruption of the graphics but works fine when loading from floppy disk so for some reason I have corruption on my hdd for some reason so I guess try a different hdd/ribbon cable/ disk controller or is there something I don't know about msdos?

- clean the contacts of your cards (rubber)
- tear everything out except the minimum
- try to re-seat any socketed chips

also inspect your mobo carefully, look for traces with dark spots inside the coating or maybe a cut by a sharp object. mostly check out the memory and chipset part. you do not have any cache?
can you do a memory test? also check the hdd for corruption spinrite is awesome or use checkit 3