Thanks for all the input on this board. I do appreciate it greatly. My XT-IDE kit is coming today so hopefully I can start playing with emm drivers and whatnot a bit later today, granted I get time to head out to the garage later. I will see if I can find the Juko branded 2.32 bios out there somewhere and try to burn that and see if that fixes the 640k barrier.

You can find the Juko ST 2.32 BIOS here:

https://www.ultimateretro.net/en/motherboards/3346

Well I searched for juko 2.32 and downloaded the BIN file out of an archive that was a mame/mess archive. Flashed it on a new AT28C64b chip and the machine does indeed count to 1024k now, however this introduced a new issue where the floppy detection takes a very long time compared to the old BIOS. Additionally the same DOS 3.3 floppy that worked before to boot, now fails and it just resets the computer over and over again instead of popping up a insert boot error replace disk type message.

Went a few posts up and downloaded the 2.30 BIOS attached here and tried that BIOS and it had the same issue. So maybe this board is just configured a tad bit differently than the offical Juko board?

Thanks Turbooo, that wasn't the same link I found for 2.32. I will download this and do a file compare to make sure i downloaded the right BIOS before.

Well that image was duplicated for a 64k image. Split it back down to 8k and did a FC on the two files with the /B switch and no differences encountered, so it must have been the same BIOS file I tried earlier. Maybe this Juko BIOS doesn't like my floppy controller, which I can't seem to find any info on or documentation other than what is printed on the PCB itself.

Assuming that JP9/10 configures the onboard BIOS for your controller card, can you see if setting it to disabled has any effect? I’ve noticed if the floppy drive isn’t detected on my board it will also reboot, I wasn’t sure if it was just my board being wonky/faulty (it was a mystery eBay special) but maybe that’s not the case after all…

That was it Turbooo, jumpering the BIOS in the floppy controller to disabled got me booting off the floppy again. What is the advantage of enabling the BIOS in the floppy controller? Just for High Density support?

That’s the main use case that I’m aware of, anyways.

JP12/13 only let you jumper between AT and PS/2 modes, I wonder if there is some incompatibility that makes it not quite work correctly with an XT.

My Juko NEST also reports 1024kb.
I agree with others that the BIOS on there has probably been replaced with something generic.
But, maybe there was a reason for the swap. Perhaps there's something in that BIOS that's better than the original.
Reporting 640kb rather than 1024kb is really not that big of a deal if you gain something useful.

With the original bios, If the memory count doesn't see or count past 640k, will the juko utilities still see that memory?