Ok some updates. First off I spent 3 solid days trying to get XTide working and was just stuck in conflict land which I couldnt overcome so I lost alot of steam on this project... lets get back to basics for a minute.
I got the new case badge and added an IDE dvdrw that had the closest color match I could find and the drive works very well.
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Also I received the other two sticks of RAM so now that I have four I pulled 4 of the 1MB simms out and we have 4 X 4MB and 4 X 1MB for 20MB ram
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@maxtherabbit brought up my ram speed was poor so lets run some tests. You saw the postings of the 8 X 1MB simms so lets first try with the 20mb mixed sims
As you can see its running at 66mhz:
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Ok so it was also brought up the turbo button could be suspect so here is the same configuration with the turbo button depressed:
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So that got me thinking that maybe the issue was the older 1mb simms were a much different speed than the new ram or vice versa. So the next test is with just the 4MB simms which I had to move to the other bank to post. We will do the same tests again and with the turbo switch.
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And again with the turbo button depressed:
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So what is the consensus? The board is just slow? Slow Cache?
So besides the RAM.. The issues and the complete frustration. So essentially this system was up and rock stable with the original UltraStor ESDI hard drive and controller (which was the floppy controller as well. In tandem with the secondary 8 bit IO card which provided paralle and serial. I was able to get the Etherlink II NIC and Ensoniq sound card working in the machine and it was great. But I wanted modern storage and an optical drive. So I bought the DTK IDE controller from post #33
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?t...build-in-almost-30-years.1246717/post-1365843
I tried using XTIDECFG.exe to make a rom and burned it to the Etherlink II
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I could only get it to work on I/O Base 300. And no matter what I got conflicts. I couldnt get the mouse to work with the NIC and the XTIDE together (forget the soundcard I never even got that far so it was out of the system).
I got so frustrated I installed my XTIDE v4 and my Lo-tech ISA ROM card with XTIDE universal bios to try and get it working.. I just couldnt. And thats where I am at.