VOGONS


First post, by Gahhhrrrlic

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So what started as me thinking my sound card wasn't working has evolved into a BIOS problem - therefore I've diverged into a separate thread so as not to confuse the issue.

My 430VX chipset computer (Shuttle HOT-557) has an Award BIOS in it.. probably one of one the earlier revisions - very similar to the one in this video with a couple fewer features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gic3pjDp82o

My computer itself, as mentioned in another thread, has a lot of stuff in it:

Serial port panel from MB header (2 ports)
Parallel port panel from MB header
USB panel from MB header (PCI device)
ATI 3D Rage II PCI
NIC PCI
ISA Modem
ISA SB16 w/ Dreamblaster daughter card
Always IN-2000 ISA SCSI card

So while I did have all this stuff working fine at one point, I've gone and lost it now because i can't recall what I did but now there is a conflict in resourcing that is preventing all my cards from being detected properly and I think it's rooted in the BIOS.

Basically my current symptom is that my SB16 card cannot be found at 220H, despite the jumpers being set to that address. I believe that the BIOS is overriding resource management and writing something else to that address. Under PNP/PCI Configuration I tried both manual and auto modes and it doesn't seem to matter. I know the card works because it did detect before and worked just fine. This is most definitely a resource issue but unlike my 386, which doesn't care what I set the jumpers to, this BIOS seems to want to change my decisions as it sees fit and then things don't work.

My question is fairly open ended since I don't know what else to try at this point but I'm just putting it out to everyone, what should I do to try to fix this? I'd like to assign my own IRQs and stuff but I don't think I can do that the same way I did for my 386 - it just seems to get ignored. Whatever is using 220H for example is blocking my sound card but I don't know how to reserve that address specifically for my sound card (BTW, none of the other common addresses work either). With 3 ISA cards, all of which I think are non-PNP, I'm not sure how to force the computer to give them priority over everything else so that they get properly detected. Having said that, my other 2 ISA cards (modem/SCSI adapter) seem to be detected fine because I have access to my hard drive and Win95 is able to set up my modem. It's just hit and miss whether I get my sound card showing up in either DOS's Diagnose.exe or in the Win95 device manager.

https://hubpages.com/technology/How-to-Maximi … -Retro-Computer

Reply 1 of 6, by AlaricD

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I think it's your SCSI controller at 220h:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy- … SI-dev-115.html

"The Big Bang. The ultimate hero of low frequency. The divine intergalactical bass drum connecting the tribes of our solar system."
Yello
"Solar Driftwood"

Reply 2 of 6, by Gahhhrrrlic

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Good call but I did anticipate this and set the jumpers to avoid that location... unless the BIOS is putting it there. This is what confuses me about the whole situation. I don't know if the jumpers mean anything at this point or if the system is just shuffling it around.

https://hubpages.com/technology/How-to-Maximi … -Retro-Computer

Reply 3 of 6, by Jo22

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Hi, how are the ISA PnP settings set in CMOS ?
Re: Zone 66 crashes on start?

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 4 of 6, by Gahhhrrrlic

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Jo22 wrote:

Hi, how are the ISA PnP settings set in CMOS ?
Re: Zone 66 crashes on start?

When it did work I think it was set to auto. Then it stopped working so I started screwing with it. In manual mode, the default is IRQ 3 an 4 (COM ports) are set to legacy ISA and everything else is PNP PCI/ISA.

I tried changing it so that IRQ 5 and DMA 1 and 5 were set to legacy ISA. This did not work. Then I tried setting everything to legacy ISA and all that did was make none of my PCI devices show up with IRQs on the POST screen. What I take from this is, you can tell a certain IRQ to support legacy ISA devices, but whether or not the device you're thinking of actually gets assigned to it is up to the BIOS somehow. Dunno if that's true but it seems to be true. Bear in mind my hardware config was no different when the sound card was working. However I believe the onboard USB controller and the master IDE channels may have been factors since, I don't need a master IDE for a SCSI hard drive and the USB was tempermental so there were times when I had turned it off. It did tend to crash W95 at the splash screen.

As a footnote, what does "reset configuration data" do? It seems redundant if it does what I think it does. The 1 time I tried it, it made the computer hang on "Verifying DMI Pool Data" and I had to reformat the machine because it would no longer boot from C.

https://hubpages.com/technology/How-to-Maximi … -Retro-Computer

Reply 5 of 6, by Gahhhrrrlic

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So... as is typically the case with me, my logical intuition had nothing to do with the real problem. Turns out the contacts were dirty or not seated correctly and how should I have known because it was working fine before but sure enough, unplugging and re-plugging card (after some contact spray on the gold fingers) made it work without a hitch.

Lesson learned, try stuff that you don't think is the problem anyway.

But actually, since non PNP ISA cards do not automatically get detected, the only way the computer knows they're there is if you have some device driver setting the IRQ/DMA/PORT info so it knows where to probe... in this sense, even if the card wasn't working due to resource problems I don't think I would have had a snowball's chance in hell of doing what I thought needed to be done, which was getting the computer to detect it. If it's installed right in the slot you should be able to access it on the jumpered IRQ/DMA/PORT.

https://hubpages.com/technology/How-to-Maximi … -Retro-Computer

Reply 6 of 6, by AlaricD

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Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Turns out the contacts were dirty or not seated correctly and how should I have known because it was working fine before but sure enough, unplugging and re-plugging card (after some contact spray on the gold fingers) made it work without a hitch.

Glad you got it sorted!

"The Big Bang. The ultimate hero of low frequency. The divine intergalactical bass drum connecting the tribes of our solar system."
Yello
"Solar Driftwood"