Jed118 wrote on 2021-01-24, 06:51:

It is a floppy controller, and I can press ESC at POSt to re-enter the a: and b: drives (high and low densities) and that battery still holds a 3.6v charge! I'm afraid to remove the battery and relocate it - I think I will solder on another battery temporarily to relocate the barrel battery.

A floppy controller with BIOS, so to support High Density drives in XT machines.
Relatively uncommon, so just get rid of the battery!

How do I dump that BIOS?

As usual, the preferred method is to do it in a programmer.
Though utilities like NSSI may also work.

This is the hard disk controller - how do I get into it to change CHS values?

http://minuszerodegrees.net/manuals.htm#Juko

Finally, does anyone know what version of Windows this is?
Anyone know what it takes to get this to work in VGA (or EGA) mode?

Looks like 2.0, AFAIR it was necessary to re-install it to change hardware settings.

Haha grzyb mi pomogl - dzieki 😉

So if I understand correctly, the floppy controller keeps the settings of the removable media only. I feel more confident moving the battery now as that is a menu selectable option to reconfigure.

I also found this:

http://www.resoo.org/docs/_hardware/th99/c/I-L/20274.htm

In it, like in the documentation you provided, it shows the CHS values, etc. How do I get into that BIOS and change them? Or are they burned in once? I see no battery on that card, how else will it keep the data?

I found this bit of information from here : https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.c … 4tFhwJg4J?pli=1
By going into debug and going to the memory location c800:5, I was able to use the configuration menu.

Actually that post was interesting to read. I don't think I'll be messing with the card though, it works - in fact, when I took the controller out to take a picture, after I put it back in, it failed to boot. I had a mini panic attack, but then I reseated the card and all went well. I do not want to touch it again if I don't have to.

If I do debug into the menu, will poking around in there cause problems? I only used debug to initialize MFM hard disks and park heads - as long as I don't save any data, I should be OK?

As for Windows, I think I'll reinstall it from here:

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-20/20

I first wanted to see if there was anything interesting on there, but from my understanding, Windows at the time was pretty much a DOS shell.

Jed118 wrote on 2021-01-24, 16:06:

So if I understand correctly, the floppy controller keeps the settings of the removable media only. I feel more confident moving the battery now as that is a menu selectable option to reconfigure.

There may be also an RTC.
Still, nothing to worry about when removing the battery.

I see no battery on that card, how else will it keep the data?

I don't know about this particular card, but I've seen some XT HDD controllers that keept their settings in some hidden sector on the HDD.
Flash memory is also possible.

If I do debug into the menu, will poking around in there cause problems? I only used debug to initialize MFM hard disks and park heads - as long as I don't save any data, I should be OK?

I wouldn't be afraid.
Yes, stuff from that era often wasn't too fool-proof, but even then it asked for confirmation before formatting the drive.

I have a similar but a bit longer Multi I/O floppy card with battery, it has the real time clock on it. Some require a utility to first set the date/time if the battery dies/gets disconnected.
Mine is not Y2k compliant 😀 Yep Windows 2.03 is the version on the HD.

Jed118 wrote on 2021-01-24, 06:51:

In an amazing stroke of luck, I have picked up a JUKO NEST V30 computer. A few years ago I had a motherboard of the same type, […]
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In an amazing stroke of luck, I have picked up a JUKO NEST V30 computer. A few years ago I had a motherboard of the same type, but this time I got a whole system.

I started off with 386 computers, so these machines were never familiar to me.

The 83 key keyboard it came with is kind of crap - I'll have to take it apart and see why it's acting the way it does (pressing "enter" throws random characters into the prompt - really hard to use). I had a 101 key keyboard with an AT/XT switch out back and it works great. I'm looking into getting a Model F for it.

It's severely yellowed - newer CDROM for contrast:

It came with a hercules mono card, which I swapped out for an ATI EDGE 8 bit VGA/EGA video card

It booted straight into DOS 3.3 off the 42 Mb IDE drive, with high density floppies-

It had some utilities on the drive, so I ran an old version of Sysinfo:

It had PC GLOBE on it, from the communist times:

I had to run the setup to get it to work in VGA mode.

It also has Windows on it, but I can't figure out how to change that to work with VGA mode.

Questions:

1) What am I looking at here:

It is a floppy controller, and I can press ESC at POSt to re-enter the a: and b: drives (high and low densities) and that battery still holds a 3.6v charge! I'm afraid to remove the battery and relocate it - I think I will solder on another battery temporarily to relocate the barrel battery.

How do I dump that BIOS?

This is the hard disk controller - how do I get into it to change CHS values? How do I dump this BIOS?

Finally, does anyone know what version of Windows this is?

Anyone know what it takes to get this to work in VGA (or EGA) mode?

in DOS just go into c:\windows and run setup.exe from here.
So change the setting for VGA, it may ask for a windows
floppy to take the files it need.

From what I've heard, NSSI doesn't make valid bios dumps unfortunately.

Deksor wrote on 2021-01-25, 12:30:

From what I've heard, NSSI doesn't make valid bios dumps unfortunately.

NSSI - or any other software - can only dump what's visible in the CPU address space.
Sometimes it's equal to the ROM's contents, sometimes not.

Yes but I think out of the 64kb of the bios it was missing few bytes for no reason.

Deksor wrote on 2021-01-25, 14:25:

Yes but I think out of the 64kb of the bios it was missing few bytes for no reason.

I can't reproduce such problems - using NSSI 0.60.45, dumped the main BIOS and the video BIOS, and the files are exactly 65536 and 32768 Bytes.
Anyway, if not NSSI, then what's the preferred tool for dumping BIOSes?

I use this for 64KB and less ROMs http://cd.textfiles.com/microhaus/mhblackbox3 … MORY/GETROM.ZIP
And I use this for more recent ROMs http://www.win3x.org/win3board/viewtopic.php? … =148481#p148481

Now for NSSI it may be perfectly good, I just remember seeing people on vogons saying that but I hadn't the time to verify. If you made sure it works, then I guess NSSI is all good 😁