hargle
Veteran Member
Hi! Hargle sent me a revised BIOS I'll be testing here soon -- hopefully tonight. I think that will shed light on the int19 hooking issue which I believe is the root issue of booting with different cards with bootable ROMs. My system has two bootable cards, one MFM (Seagate, I think) and another of those funky FDC cards for HD floppy drives (JDR used to sell these).
i'm still immersed in working that aspect of the BIOS. I haven't tried the card out yet with my own MFM controller in the machine, so don't expect a lot of miracles just yet. I do plan on spending some more time with the BIOS this weekend, so hang in there! (sorry I keep delaying my release of 009, but I think it'll be worth it)
As Per has suggested, the best way to get the system to boot is to make sure the xtide loads its BIOS in last. You can freely move the ROM address around to make sure it gets the highest address above the other cards. If you move the IO address, you will need to use the flash setup program.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Those testing the board might like to do some "up close and personal" inspection of the board using an oscilloscope/spectrum analyzer. There may be noise sources causing issues. Certainly, there are many bypass capacitors, an isolation capacitor, ground planes and the like but its still possible there is something flakey in the design. However, the problems so far seem to be rather specific to individual systems.
I think this is something that mike and I can do at my workplace some weekend. If he can spare the time to come up to minneapolis, we can pop into my work and hook up the logic analyzer we have here and start getting some captures of some signals. I first want to find a drive or two that absolutely won't work properly with our card (lutiana seems to have one) and then we can start to investigate. The new BIOS might change the outcome of the list of drives that are failing, although I kinda doubt it.
Those failing drives will have to be shipped here for us to test with.
I'll see if I can get one of my hardware co-workers to help out as well. Otherwise we might have to fly andrew in to help out.