Help with Sergey's 8-Bit FDC and Serial Port board.

[fjk61011]

I'm at the end of my quest for the DTK.

 

[fjk61011]

Have set up my IBM downstairs. It has 8088 and 8087 processors.

Hercules VGA

Parallel port board.

Memory board bringing memory up to 640k.

Com port board. (for Serdrive)

XT-IDE with CF port and IDE port with 64 Mb CF card.

XT-FDC with Serial port.

Keyboard.

Gotek and 1.44 Mb floppy drive.

VGA display.

XIRCOM PE3 (parallel).

IBM DOS 6.3.

mTCP.

All working very quitely.

 

[shirsch]

@sergey Have you had any recent thoughts about the issue I reported last fall where I was not able to successfully write configuration to the Flash memory on my FDC? Just bashed my head into it again today. It gets tedious rebuilding the EEPROM image from source and writing with xiflash whenever I need a different config.

 

[sergey]

@shirsch unfortunately, I haven't. It is quite weird that xiflash succeeds and the built-in in BIOS extension fails... They use very similar algorithm

 

[shirsch]

One difference I see is that the BIOS code is executed very early in the boot process. Why that alone would make a difference is a mystery, however. Is it possible the BIOS is not getting the base address correct? The machine is not setup at the moment and I do not recall if it announces where it believes itself to be located.

 

[modem7]

One difference I see is that the BIOS code is executed very early in the boot process. Why that alone would make a difference is a mystery ...

To test that hypothesis, perhaps Sergey could give you some DEBUG commands that will execute the BIOS code that runs as a result of pressing F2.

Is it possible the BIOS is not getting the base address correct? The machine is not setup at the moment and I do not recall if it announces where it believes itself to be located.

There is a photo of what version 2.2 of 'Sergeys Multi-Floppy BIOS' displays at [here]. No 'ROM at address xxxxx' type text displayed. It seems unlikely to me that the BIOS could get that wrong.

You could try the RAYXTFDC tool at [here]. If the Multi-Floppy BIOS is appearing at multiple locations, RAYXTFDC will report that. Even if it is at multiple locations, surely the flashing code would work irrespective of which instance was targeted. Although, an instance could be partially conflicting with something else.