I’ve purchased one of these cards, one of the members here has advised me that I might be able to get a BIOS chip from one of our members, to make it possible for me to be able to get large hard disk supports. Anyone able to point me in the right direction?
Thanks very much.
VLB OD6500A Multi I/O Controller Card
Are you looking for something like this?
douglar wrote on 2020-12-17, 14:26:Are you looking for something like this?
Thank you very much.
I think this is what I am looking for.
This era is all very new to me. So if I come across uneducated, it's because I am. Ha
Working on that though 😉
XTIDE is OK. It's nicer than disk overlays most of the time. Might be the best you are going to do on something that's a 286 or older.
However look around to see if you can find an MR Bios for your mobo. That's the way to go. It's the premium ride.
I have an FIC PT-2003. The old bios was fussy, 528MB limited, and unclear.
I found the MR Bios for it. Feels feels like a painful splinter was removed from my foot.
It's like the person who wrote it actually cared if I was happy or not.
Features like large drives, readable menus, and a configurable hot key to go straight to the bios while in DOS without testing my keyboard reflexes.
Or hot keys to go straight to the boot menu. Or enable/disable disable L2 cache on the fly. Crazy fun stuff.
douglar wrote on 2020-12-17, 20:03:XTIDE is OK. It's nicer than disk overlays most of the time. Might be the best you are going to do on something that's a 286 […]
XTIDE is OK. It's nicer than disk overlays most of the time. Might be the best you are going to do on something that's a 286 or older.
However look around to see if you can find an MR Bios for your mobo. That's the way to go. It's the premium ride.
I have an FIC PT-2003. The old bios was fussy, 528MB limited, and unclear.
I found the MR Bios for it. Feels feels like a painful splinter was removed from my foot.
It's like the person who wrote it actually cared if I was happy or not.
Features like large drives, readable menus, and a configurable hot key to go straight to the bios while in DOS without testing my keyboard reflexes.
Or hot keys to go straight to the boot menu. Or enable/disable disable L2 cache on the fly. Crazy fun stuff.
My board doesn't have onboard IDE, it's on the separate controller and doesn't its own boot ROM installed yet.
Mvickers03 wrote on 2020-12-18, 18:24:My board doesn't have onboard IDE, it's on the separate controller and doesn't its own boot ROM installed yet.
If your controller was something proprietary, you would need to find a very specific BIOS for your card, but your controller looks like a bog standard, hardware compatible IDE controller, so just about any bios should work with that card.
That gives you two choices to fix low-featured Mobo BIOS:
1) you can replace/upgrade your existing motherboard BIOS, either find something from the vendor or from MR BIOS . That's my preferred solution
or 2) you can add a supplemental boot rom like XTIDE universal to handle the IDE geometry for your system under DOS if you can't fix the motherbboard BIOS
Where you stick the BIOS doesn't matter that much. You can put an add-on XTIDE universal BIOS chip on your controller card. You can put it on a NIC. XTIDE on 3C509B card You can even build a minimalist little add in board on the cheap https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/isa-rom-board-pcb/
But if you can find MR BIOS for your board, it's a lot more elegant.
Mvickers03 wrote on 2020-12-18, 18:24:douglar wrote on 2020-12-17, 20:03:XTIDE is OK. It's nicer than disk overlays most of the time. Might be the best you are going to do on something that's a 286 […]
XTIDE is OK. It's nicer than disk overlays most of the time. Might be the best you are going to do on something that's a 286 or older.
However look around to see if you can find an MR Bios for your mobo. That's the way to go. It's the premium ride.
I have an FIC PT-2003. The old bios was fussy, 528MB limited, and unclear.
I found the MR Bios for it. Feels feels like a painful splinter was removed from my foot.
It's like the person who wrote it actually cared if I was happy or not.
Features like large drives, readable menus, and a configurable hot key to go straight to the bios while in DOS without testing my keyboard reflexes.
Or hot keys to go straight to the boot menu. Or enable/disable disable L2 cache on the fly. Crazy fun stuff.
My board doesn't have onboard IDE, it's on the separate controller (VLB card) and doesn't have its own boot ROM installed yet.
douglar wrote on 2020-12-18, 18:52:If your controller was something proprietary, you would need to find a very specific BIOS for your card, but your controller loo […]
Mvickers03 wrote on 2020-12-18, 18:24:My board doesn't have onboard IDE, it's on the separate controller and doesn't its own boot ROM installed yet.
If your controller was something proprietary, you would need to find a very specific BIOS for your card, but your controller looks like a bog standard, hardware compatible IDE controller, so just about any bios should work with that card.
That gives you two choices to fix low-featured Mobo BIOS:
1) you can replace/upgrade your existing motherboard BIOS, either find something from the vendor or from MR BIOS . That's my preferred solution
or 2) you can add a supplemental boot rom like XTIDE universal to handle the IDE geometry for your system under DOS if you can't fix the motherbboard BIOSWhere you stick the BIOS doesn't matter that much. You can put an add-on XTIDE universal BIOS chip on your controller card. You can put it on a NIC. XTIDE on 3C509B card You can even build a minimalist little add in board on the cheap https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/isa-rom-board-pcb/
But if you can find MR BIOS for your board, it's a lot more elegant.
Thank you for the details. I’ve decided to go for a replacement BIOS from Mr Chips.
Sorry my last answer didn’t make much sense. It was late and I clearly hadn’t read what you had typed properly.
I hadn’t realised the motherboard BIOS was controlling the IO card. I thought they would be much more separate. I think updating the main board BIOS is the way to go.
Am I right in thinking, that if I put a BIOS chip on the IO card it would increase boot time, as the boot ROM would have to initialize?
What motherboard are you using? Maybe I can help you find a rom image.
douglar wrote on 2020-12-22, 16:58:What motherboard are you using? Maybe I can help you find a rom image.
It's this one.
Chicony CH-486-33/50P:
Someone on here advised I dump the BIOS on it for the archival purposes.
That looks like a UMC UM82C480 chipset -- http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/1263
There's a decent chance that the MR-BIOS from this board will work-- http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/5409
In order to backup or program bios for a motherboard that age, you usually need a burner . I think this one is most common -- http://www.autoelectric.cn/en/tl866_main.html
And you probably want to get an EEprom that works with your motherboard, which in this case is likely a 512Kbit dip28 eeprom (with 2 e's). Check your current eprom (with one e) rom just to make sure what size you have.
The other option is to get a uv eprom eraser to reset your current rom eprom (only one "e" here) , but you are in a scary spot if the new bios doesn't work. If you put the new bios on a second chip, you just put the old chip back in place if there's an issue, and you don't have to hold your breath until you get the old chip successfully re-written.
douglar wrote on 2020-12-24, 15:36:That looks like a UMC UM82C480 chipset -- http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/1263 […]
That looks like a UMC UM82C480 chipset -- http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/1263
There's a decent chance that the MR-BIOS from this board will work-- http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/5409
In order to backup or program bios for a motherboard that age, you usually need a burner . I think this one is most common -- http://www.autoelectric.cn/en/tl866_main.html
And you probably want to get an EEprom that works with your motherboard, which in this case is likely a 512Kbit dip28 eeprom (with 2 e's). Check your current eprom (with one e) rom just to make sure what size you have.
The other option is to get a uv eprom eraser to reset your current rom eprom (only one "e" here) , but you are in a scary spot if the new bios doesn't work. If you put the new bios on a second chip, you just put the old chip back in place if there's an issue, and you don't have to hold your breath until you get the old chip successfully re-written.
Thanks for the information mate.
Do you happen to know any members that might be willing to do this for me and send me a pre programmed chip?
I don't fancy purchasing a burner just for this if I can help it.
You can leave this socket empty. You don't need anything there. (Unless it's very special-featured io controller, which i doubt)
You can fit stuff in there to extend your motherboard's bios (like XT-IDE), but it is unnecessary in general. (Only required, if your mainboard's bios doesn't allow big hdds yet you want to use them)
What is nice is that just for XT-IDE, you don't need to put a network card in to your computer - you can use this io controller instead.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!
So the card is actually a QDI COMPUTER, INC. QD6500A
http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/c/P-R/20752.htm
It's just that there's a traverse through the board on the Q that makes it look like an O.
I stumbled into one recently and I'm going to try to make it work with XTIDE
I can't get the rom to work. Both of these cards work with 32bit Xtide UB when I put the rom in a Lan Card, but I can't get the rom slot in the QD6500A to work yet.
The Rom slot is labeled "27C512". l tried a W27C512-70 and a AT28C64. Do I just have the wrong roms?
Top card has a QD-6580. Bottom card has a QD-6500 + rom socket and two extra sockets labeled 74LS244 & 74LS138 .
Should I consider adding a 74LS244 buffer chip? They look like they are pretty inexpensive.
Also, what is the 74LS138 chip for?
They are probably both necessary. On this card that doesn't have any parts populated yet, the ROM address jumpers ranging form C800 to DE00 connect into the 74LS138, which I think is for decoding the address access / determining where it maps to. The 74LS244 probably connects the ROM segment of that card to the ISA BUS.
Ok, that makes sense for the 74LS138. I’ll try it again once my chip arrive.
Could the 74LS244 chip be a fifo buffer of some sort? J16 on my board is to enable it.
Edit: I'm not an expert on this, but seems like it's a bus driver: https://www.ti.com/product/SN74LS244#description
That would be for send signals across the ISA bus, yes?
