pianoman72
Experienced Member
Hello,
Please bear with me, as this is a pretty long post.
I'm trying to get my "new" 286@20mhz motherboard working with my expanded memory board, AST Rampage plus 286 (with 2megs of ram). The motherboard works great by itself, having 4megs of ram onboard. However, when I use the latest version or REMM.SYS (AST's expanded memory manager), I only get data errors messages, when the expanded memory is counted.
I have read that this motherboard has the Opti 82C206 chipset, which uses shadow ram scheming in the BIOS. Sure enough, in the BIOS there are options to turn off Shadow BIOS at different 16k intervals, starting with Video addresses, C000, and up to the BIOS addresses, FFFF. Only the Video and Bios shadowing has to be turned on, because the system will not boot normally otherwise, showing some kind of parity error and freezing (even though I do have the parity option turned off in the bios).
On top of that, there is an EMS option in the BIOS (different than with my AST board), which can either be turned on or off. This works in conjunction with the shadow ram, showing how much ems is available. With the video and bios shadows, you can supposedly get 272kb, but that will not translate to DOS when it boots, since I most likely need some memory manager (different than remm.sys), which I do not have, and could not get any results for this by searching the web.
I do not want that EMS option in the bios anyway, so I keep it turned off. However, there is a frame address page option right next to it, which is defaulted to E000, as well as the port address, which shows 02E8. These 2 options, can be changed, and I have done all possible combinations, in order to not have any conflicts with my real EMS board, but to no avail. I have even specified all the possible different addresses for the page frame with REMM.sys memory manager, starting from C400, all the way to E000, excluding addresses as well which seemed to conflict with the BIOS settings (using the /x=e000-e400, and so on). I know that my AST board is using the 208h port, which does not conflict with the one in the BIOS.
Also, I have tried to set up the software for my AST board, using the smart switch program (after changing the jumper pin on the board, to reset the settings), which I got from another link on this forum, but that does not work with my version of the AST Rampage Plus 286 (the manual also shows a different 2nd set of jumper configuration, so probably my hardware is a different version).
Since I cannot seem to turn off this Bios Shadowing and EMS addressing in the BIOS, I have run out of options. I'm sure I'm missing something, and of course I am hoping that someone on this forum might be knowledgeable enough to show me different possibilities, in order to make my EMS board work with this otherwise wonderful motherboard.
Thank you for your patience in reading this, and I would appreciate any input that you might have in order to solve this potentially frustrating problem.
Please bear with me, as this is a pretty long post.
I'm trying to get my "new" 286@20mhz motherboard working with my expanded memory board, AST Rampage plus 286 (with 2megs of ram). The motherboard works great by itself, having 4megs of ram onboard. However, when I use the latest version or REMM.SYS (AST's expanded memory manager), I only get data errors messages, when the expanded memory is counted.
I have read that this motherboard has the Opti 82C206 chipset, which uses shadow ram scheming in the BIOS. Sure enough, in the BIOS there are options to turn off Shadow BIOS at different 16k intervals, starting with Video addresses, C000, and up to the BIOS addresses, FFFF. Only the Video and Bios shadowing has to be turned on, because the system will not boot normally otherwise, showing some kind of parity error and freezing (even though I do have the parity option turned off in the bios).
On top of that, there is an EMS option in the BIOS (different than with my AST board), which can either be turned on or off. This works in conjunction with the shadow ram, showing how much ems is available. With the video and bios shadows, you can supposedly get 272kb, but that will not translate to DOS when it boots, since I most likely need some memory manager (different than remm.sys), which I do not have, and could not get any results for this by searching the web.
I do not want that EMS option in the bios anyway, so I keep it turned off. However, there is a frame address page option right next to it, which is defaulted to E000, as well as the port address, which shows 02E8. These 2 options, can be changed, and I have done all possible combinations, in order to not have any conflicts with my real EMS board, but to no avail. I have even specified all the possible different addresses for the page frame with REMM.sys memory manager, starting from C400, all the way to E000, excluding addresses as well which seemed to conflict with the BIOS settings (using the /x=e000-e400, and so on). I know that my AST board is using the 208h port, which does not conflict with the one in the BIOS.
Also, I have tried to set up the software for my AST board, using the smart switch program (after changing the jumper pin on the board, to reset the settings), which I got from another link on this forum, but that does not work with my version of the AST Rampage Plus 286 (the manual also shows a different 2nd set of jumper configuration, so probably my hardware is a different version).
Since I cannot seem to turn off this Bios Shadowing and EMS addressing in the BIOS, I have run out of options. I'm sure I'm missing something, and of course I am hoping that someone on this forum might be knowledgeable enough to show me different possibilities, in order to make my EMS board work with this otherwise wonderful motherboard.
Thank you for your patience in reading this, and I would appreciate any input that you might have in order to solve this potentially frustrating problem.