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Everex EV-165

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First post, by Robin4

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I have some question about this ems board i purphased some weeks ago.. This card arrived to my home, and i hadnt much time to test it..
It came with 2 banks of memory.. Because i had more left i fill out the whole card to a whoping 2048K..
I didnt had a tested system ready, because didnt want to ruin my NEC V20 XT build with it.. So i tested it in my Vtech Laser 8086 XT/3 system, because there wherent much options installed..
This system came with a dual display mode graphics card that would do MCA or CGA.. Because i dont have a 9 pins old style monitor here (and i dont think i will ever buy one, because of to expensive and that does monitors can get broken soon) so i replaced it with a WD Vga 8-bit isa instead.. I did this only so get the screen working.

When i installed all chips i tested it with the test program what came with the drivers.. There where 2 chips faulty which over a couple of tests confirms they still where faulty, and i had replaced them..
So i let those test more times to see if faults will occur after some time. So now when everything should be working i got installing the emm.sys driver.. The bad is that you need manual editting the config.sys file.. On my intel one everything goes easly automatic.. I add device=emm.sys 258,00 to the config.sys file.. After rebooting the memory manager shows up..
The weird thing is.. Sometimes everthing is just fine, and sometimes its says a page frame doesnt malfunctioning fine (is bad) So i guess one of the memory chips is fucking me now.. But the test says everything is fine..

What is the best to do ? ( if i need replace a whole row, then i have to buy 9 new chips.) I still can try to see if the tests will still pass or not..

My other question. The board saying that is having 128 page frames.. I really like to know how big they actually are if the board is having 2048KB of memory installed..

Other question, if i want to install a printer spooler (iam dont going to use the ramdrive part, because of loosing data when systems goes accidentally off. Which part of the ram would be used from the card?

Iam think that i need to set a new starting point for the page frame about 1/3 from the beginning of the board so the printer spooler would use the first part of the card (is this true that the printer spooler would get installed on the first section of the card? So everything i will add would installed on the first part of the card?

~ At least it can do black and white~

Reply 1 of 4, by idspispopd

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Robin4 wrote:

My other question. The board saying that is having 128 page frames.. I really like to know how big they actually are if the board is having 2048KB of memory installed.

An EMS page is 16kB. In the first revisions of the EMS specification you had a 64kB window so 4 pages could be mapped at the same time.
With EMS 4.0 things got more flexible, you could map pages basically anywhere in the first 1MB. Pages were still 16kB.
16kB * 128 = 2048kB so that would fit.

Reply 2 of 4, by Robin4

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So 16KB page frames are faster to read? (less switching from page to page?)

~ At least it can do black and white~

Reply 3 of 4, by Jolaes76

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Be aware that the card might be perfectly operational as such, but it is not entirely compatible with your motherboard and/or installed memory. 🙁
I have the same issues with my RAMPAGE AT PLUS card (max 8 MB SIMMs) in my 25 Mhz 286. Well, my case is even worse because I need to reduce BUS speed to make it work.
If I populate the SIMM slots on the motherboard, I get RAM parity errors / page faults. With only the DIP ram installed (max 1 MB), the motherboard can work with the EMS board.

Bottom line, if you shovel up old manuals and tech correspondence, you will find that even the latest, best EMS boards like the AT RAMPAGE PLUS and Tecmar ClassicRAM have issues with certain chipsets 🙁

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 4 of 4, by Robin4

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I installed this card in one of my XT compatible machines (because of the 8-bit bus), about speed it should be fine.. I just think there are just some dip ram chips are you from the end of their lives.. Some ram just looks heavly used.. So its just a
gamble when they passed out.. Iam just going to try and see if i can find these bad chips on luck and by hand.. On the other side the card just works.

~ At least it can do black and white~