I am having some BIOS issues with my Rev 1 card and they have to do with the SETCARD app and I think they might be related to BIOS corruption (or the fact that I burned the card to hell by plugging it in backwards even though I have replaced all the components).
I figure that I'll wait till REV 2 and not really worry about this one too much. The hardware changes on REV 2 should help with the corruption issue.
Testing the REV 2 card should be focused on plugging these things into every system that we can get our hands on that have a ISA slot and see if they work, and at the same time updating the list of known working drives. Most of the fixes moving forward should be software related. There should also be a real focus in documentation.
Per:
Is there anyway to make a setup menu in the BIOS itself rather than using DOS based command lines? Sort of like what you see in some RAID cards, it would not have to be elaborate, perhaps show the specs of the 2 drives plugged in and allow you to toggle the few options. Perhaps add the option to manually override the drive geometry.
I think this will increase the overall usability of the card.
Also, I know that I have asked this before but I forgot the answer and cannot find it in this enormous posting, but why do we have both hardware and software settings for the IO and memory ranges? Can we do away with the software setting, or perhaps have the BIOS grab the software settings directly from the hardware dips? It seems that having them both independently controllable could lead to an unusable card (or at least one that would take a very long time to get right).
Hargle and I are discussing how we intend to handle the sales of these items, and since Jameco is local to me I have offered to purchase the parts wholesale and sell them from there, this would mean that you CA guys would need to pay me sales tax, but it does mean the the overall cost of the card should decrease a little, especially when we start ordering the quantities that we will need for the interest we see here. On a side note, I can probably do this with other hardware projects that are going on in this community if need be.
We will keep you guys updated on how to buy them when they become available, and we are hoping this will be soon.
I figure that I'll wait till REV 2 and not really worry about this one too much. The hardware changes on REV 2 should help with the corruption issue.
Testing the REV 2 card should be focused on plugging these things into every system that we can get our hands on that have a ISA slot and see if they work, and at the same time updating the list of known working drives. Most of the fixes moving forward should be software related. There should also be a real focus in documentation.
Per:
Is there anyway to make a setup menu in the BIOS itself rather than using DOS based command lines? Sort of like what you see in some RAID cards, it would not have to be elaborate, perhaps show the specs of the 2 drives plugged in and allow you to toggle the few options. Perhaps add the option to manually override the drive geometry.
I think this will increase the overall usability of the card.
Also, I know that I have asked this before but I forgot the answer and cannot find it in this enormous posting, but why do we have both hardware and software settings for the IO and memory ranges? Can we do away with the software setting, or perhaps have the BIOS grab the software settings directly from the hardware dips? It seems that having them both independently controllable could lead to an unusable card (or at least one that would take a very long time to get right).
Hargle and I are discussing how we intend to handle the sales of these items, and since Jameco is local to me I have offered to purchase the parts wholesale and sell them from there, this would mean that you CA guys would need to pay me sales tax, but it does mean the the overall cost of the card should decrease a little, especially when we start ordering the quantities that we will need for the interest we see here. On a side note, I can probably do this with other hardware projects that are going on in this community if need be.
We will keep you guys updated on how to buy them when they become available, and we are hoping this will be soon.