First post, by iulianv
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A few months ago I got a Tomato/Zida 4DPS board and tried to build a system around it (with an A80486DX4-120SV8B). I quickly noticed that the COM ports didn't seem to work, so I put the board aside and moved to testing other parts I had around...
Yesterday, while working on a 386 system, I noticed that there is one file in the CTMOUSE "distribution", namely COMTEST.COM, that can tell you what COM ports you have and what is connected to them.
I tried it on the 4DPS and it found two serial ports, with nothing attached to them no matter where I connected the mouse. So I thought that something broke between the I/O chip and the actual connectors on the board, but the weird thing is that, if I connect the small ribbon cable the wrong way, COMTEST.COM will show "modem" attached to the serial port, so something still goes through.
Is there any way to further debug this, or should I just toss the board and move on? There's also the option of using an ISA controller to get working COMs, but I usually don't like the idea of keeping parts that are not fully functional...