Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-11-21, 12:06:

I'm really curious what's in those BIOS chips. The board is using two 256kbit EPROMs, which seems like a lot for an XT.

*edit* I just had a peek. Looks like the disk controller BIOS is also contained in these chips. I noticed the system BIOS is written by Acer and seems to have support for 1.44MB drives. Somebody should see if this BIOS works on standard XT boards.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2021-11-21, 12:06:

I'm really curious what's in those BIOS chips. The board is using two 256kbit EPROMs, which seems like a lot for an XT.

I guess it might have a setup dialog, which ofc blows up BIOS size.
Regarding the 1.44MB floppy support, it depends on the data separator on the particular controller whether this can be handled or not, so even with "normal" XTs, they will only work with more modern controllers.

In my opinion having HD floppy support build into the BIOS would be preferable to having it on a separate ROM. You can probably free up slightly more UMB memory that way.