By the way, next beta will have native support for QDI Vision QD6500 and QD6580 VLB IDE controllers. Read rates were 1.9 MB/s with beta 1 and now they are nearly 7 MB/s on my 486. I'd like to know if there is need for supporting other VLB or PCI controllers as well.
Another way is to place the ROM on a network controller card (I recommend 3Com). There are also some VLB multi I/O cards with ROM socket. I have one but it requires two additional support chips so network cards are easier. Note that you cannot flash the BIOS when using NIC or I/O card (you can flash it on the XTIDE and then move the EEPROM to the NIC or you need to use external EPROM writer).
I have a 486 motherboard (PX486 P3 with OPTi 495SLC chipset and AMI BIOS [the sticker on the BIOS chips says 486DX ISA BIOS (C)1993 AB0251175]) and even though the BIOS can detect the full size of my CF card (4066 cylinders / 2,001 MB), DOS, fdisk, and Windows can only see 1024 cylinders (504 MB), so I guess my BIOS doesn't do any translation.
I was reading a thread on a different forum about that particular issue (and I already know about the drive overlay solution, such as EZ Drive, which I've used before, but I don't really like it), and someone mentioned that some cards, such as HDD controllers, have a BIOS socket, so I went looking through my old computer parts and found a Vision QD6500 VLB card with a BIOS socket and doing an internet search for the name of the card led me to this thread.
This is a big thread that will take a lot of time for me to read completely through, so I hope I'm not asking questions that have already been answered:
1. In your post from 2012 that I quoted above, you mentioned that the next beta of will have native support for QDI Vision QD6500 and QD6580 VLB IDE controllers. Now that it's 2023, was that native support ever implemented, and if so, is there anything specific I need to do in the current version of ide_386.bin to enable it?
2. My QD6500 card's BIOS socket calls for a 27C512 EPROM, which is 512 kilobits / 64 kilobytes, which is 8 times the size of the 8 KB ide_386.bin file. Normally I would just concatenate 8 copies of the .bin file to program the oversized EPROM with (doing that works for using 27256 EPROMs in place of 2764 EPROMs in one of my arcade machines), but is that the right thing to do in this case? What EPROM programming method did you use for your QD card, and what brand of EPROM did you use?
3. The two additional support chips that you mentioned; those are a 74LS244 and a 74LS138 TTL chip, right?