• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here
  • From now on we will require that a prefix is set for any items in the sales area. We have created regions and locations for this. We also require that you select a delivery option before posting your listing. This will hopefully help us streamline the things that get listed for sales here and help local people better advertise their items, especially for local only sales. New sales rules are also coming, so stay tuned.

WANTED: Future Domain TMC-850M BIOS

I always suspected that it may be something with the BIOS on the XT that makes the MER with 8.2 BIOS not work.
Now that I own an actual PC as well, I will try it out on both and see what happens. that probably won't be happening for awhile, but I'll post back here when i get to it.

My symptoms are (again, sorry if you've read this before) the card would not find any drives and/or hang in POST. Totally bare XT machine (dunno the BIOS) and only a video card installed.

Move the same card+cable+drive into a different 8bit machine, and it works perfectly. There were no IO or memory conflicts in either machine.

Some day I will get to the bottom of this one...
 
Anonymous Coward said:
I have a TMC-850M with V8.2 BIOS working just fine in a 5150PC. The only thing that annoys me though is the drive scanning is quite slow, something which isn't a problem on my XT clone.

What's odd is that I was actually not able to get my TMC-850M to work properly in my 5150 WITHOUT the BIOS. Loading the drivers would just lock up the system.
Click to expand...

I soldered in the 8.2 bios ROM chip (had somebody on ebay burn me one from the file listed on this forum) and I don't see anything on boot, the system just goes to the floppy drives with no SCSI bios screen.

Do I need some support chips for this to work?
 
Unknown_K said:
I soldered in the 8.2 bios ROM chip (had somebody on ebay burn me one from the file listed on this forum) and I don't see anything on boot, the system just goes to the floppy drives with no SCSI bios screen.
Click to expand...

It's not unusual for vendors who sold SCSI cards for CD-ROM support to leave off a decoder chip as well as the BIOS ROM.

Can you see the ROM image in memory using DEBUG? If not, you probably have your answer.
 
Chuck(G) said:
It's not unusual for vendors who sold SCSI cards for CD-ROM support to leave off a decoder chip as well as the BIOS ROM.

Can you see the ROM image in memory using DEBUG? If not, you probably have your answer.
Click to expand...

How do you use the debug command to do that? There is a chip missing next to the rom with a F244 label.
 
Suppose you have the jumpers set for a CA00 BIOS address.

Under DEBUG, you'd do the following:

DEBUG
-DCA00:0
...data is displayed...
-q

The boldface items are what you type. It should be pretty obvious from the data display.

I suspect that a 74LS244 is missing on your board, if it's a 20-pin IC. Easy enough to find.
 
Anonymous Coward said:
You can examine the missing chip in a photo from my picasa webalbum:

http://picasaweb.google.com/misterzeropage/MyVintageComputerStuff#5258191091085459330

I have another Future Domain card which is quite a bit different that doesn't seem to need the chip. It looks as if the decoder may be integrated into the main IC.

http://picasaweb.google.com/misterzeropage/MyVintageComputerStuff#5097368919069973682
Click to expand...

Thanks, my card is just like the one on top. Currently looking for that DM74ls244wm chip.

If this thing works I might try finding the rest of the parts so I can use the 4 pin molex connector and them mount a HD bracked to those top 2 unused holes and make a hardcard out of it (should be cool for machines without internal drive power plugs or places to mount a HD).
 
Those SMT LS244s should be present on a lot of Pentium-I era motherboards as well as all manner of other gadgets and boards. If you get stuck, I can send you a few for the price of postage.
 
I ordered some chips from ebay and screwed up on the form factor (too small). So anyway five minutes later I was digging for some VRAM chips in a pile somebody had sent me ages ago (they had just cut up video cards without taking the RAM off) and wouldn't you know it there was a F244 chip of the correct size.

So after some desoldering and soldering I got the card running on my Kaypro NECV20 XT clone, works very well and was an easy setup. I am using DOS 3.3 and you can only have (2) 32MB partitions using that OS correct?

Even with purchasing an EPROM plus the wrong support chip I think I only have $12 in the thing including shipping (includes the card), not too bad I guess.
 
I've got some Disk Maestro (V5.30) disks here in case anyone wants/needs 'em and they're not out there already.

This is the Future Domain utilities package for TMC and MCS adapters; diagnostics, format & partition, drivers, etc.

4x360/2x720 disks; compatible w/ up to 3.31/4.0
 
MikeS said:
I've got some Disk Maestro (V5.30) disks here in case anyone wants/needs 'em and they're not out there already.

This is the Future Domain utilities package for TMC and MCS adapters; diagnostics, format & partition, drivers, etc.

4x360/2x720 disks; compatible w/ up to 3.31/4.0
Click to expand...

Can you make winimage files of those disks?
 
Unknown_K said:
Can you make winimage files of those disks?
Click to expand...
Geez, you guys! I'm trying to get rid of some of my hundreds of original disks, not archive them all ;-)

I've imaged them, but can't find a way to upload them in the new and improved S/W; I seem to get screens that overlap and can't find one that lets me upload from my computer.

Progress, bah!

PM me your off-list email address and I'll send 'em to you; then you can figure out how to post 'em.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top