Sergeys XT-CFLite ISA card help

[shadow 338 (shadow338)]

Hello,

Problem:

Card is not detected when using the onboard XT-IDE bios that is flashed on the 2864 EEPROM,  but it works (detected and boots from CF card) with the Micro 8088 BIOS with XT-IDE support (bios-micro8088-xtide.rom)

Details:

I'm successfully using the XT-CF Lite (v4.1) card on the Micro 8088 computer when using the XT-IDE support from the Micro 8088 bios (bios-micro8088-xtide.rom) v1.0.0

Since I also want to use the XT-CF card on other systems (IBM 5150), I'm using the Micro 8088 booted into MS-DOS to customize the configuration using the 'xtidecfg.com' utility.

I downloaded the latest binary from here:

https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/binaries/r625/

loaded the 'ide_xt.bin' file and used the following settings:

Device type [XTCF PIO]

Primary IDE controller 'base address' [320h]
EEPROM type [2864]
EEPROM address [D000h]

It flashes successfully and to test if the card works with the new settings I disabled the 'Scan F0000-F7FFF area for BIOS extension ROMs' on the Micro 8088 BIOS setup utility.

With the XT-CF card dip switches set to Port: 0x320 and EEPROM address [D000h], the card is not detected.

I also plugged in the card to an IBM 5150 and also it not detected.

Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong here?

Thanks in advance!

Henrique

[Sergey Kiselev]

It appears that for some reason the system is unable to access the BIOS extension ROM on your XT-CF Lite v4.1 card or the BIOS extension ROM was not programmed successfully.

A few questions and notes:

1. Did you program the EEPROM using "XTIDECFG.COM" utility? Was it successfully programmed?

2. What are the settings for the EEPROM enable and write enable switches? Perhaps take a photo of the card and post it here?

3. If you boot into MS-DOS, e.g., from a floppy disk, or using XT-IDE BIOS built into the Micro 8088 BIOS, can you dump D000:0000 area using DOS DEBUG and verify the content?

4. If I recall correctly, XT-CF-Lite should be using "XT-CF PIO8 (BIU offload)" mode.

Thanks,

Sergey

[shadow 338 (shadow338)]

Sergey,

1. Did you program the EEPROM using "XTIDECFG.COM" utility? Was it successfully programmed?

A: Yes and Yes (pic attached) but more on that on '3'.

2. What are the settings for the EEPROM enable and write enable switches? Perhaps take a photo of the card and post it here?

A: Pic attached but basically I used the following:

Primary IDE controller 'base address' [320h]

EEPROM address [D000h]

Please note that SW2.2 (EEPROM Write Enable) was enabled during the flashing process but the pic was taken after flashing.

3. If you boot into MS-DOS, e.g., from a floppy disk, or using XT-IDE BIOS built into the Micro 8088 BIOS, can you dump D000:0000 area using DOS DEBUG and verify the content?

A: Neat idea. I ran 'debug' but I'm definitely not getting the correct data (pic attached). I did some further testing where I removed the EEPROM and dumped the content manually using 'minipro' and bin file contains a header showing a XTIDE version from '2013-04-03' which is bizarre. This was definitely from a past attempt and I'm not sure how "XTIDECFG.COM" showed 'successfully' when the bios that was flashed has the date of '2023-02-19'. So this poses the question, is XTIDECFG.COM really flashing the EEPROM correctly? I also tried multiple 8K EEPROMs including chips that I know that work on other systems in order to rule out a faulty EEPROM.

On a different test, I flashed the EEPROM manually using minipro and under MSDOS I ran debug '-d d000:0000' but it still does not show the correct data. I'm a bit lost at this point. I mean, the XT-CF works fine using the XT-IDE support from the Micro 8088 BIOS but I guess something on the EEPROM portion of the circuit may be faulty?

4. If I recall correctly, XT-CF-Lite should be using "XT-CF PIO8 (BIU offload)" mode.

A: I initially used ' [XTCF PIO]' and I changed to "XT-CF PIO8 (BIU offload)" and flashed again but it made no difference as it still does not find the XT-CF.

----

Thanks for getting back to me on this.

Henrique.

[Sergey Kiselev]

Is it possible that you have UMBs enabled on your Micro 8088? The 0xD0000-0xD7FFF mapping is controlled by the SW3.3 switch - the middle switch on the top left DIP switch block.

That would explain why XTIDECFG.COM works (because it programs the SRAM and Flash ROM) and why the content is corrupt after power cycle / reboot.

It doesn't explain why the card doesn't work in your IBM PC... Unless you have another card that uses 0xD0000-0xD1FFF area.

Thanks,

Sergey

[shadow 338 (shadow338)]

You are correct. I have UMB enabled (using 0xD0000) so that explains why XTIDECFG was flashing successfully since it was programing the SRAM instead of the flash chip. Since then, I disabled UMB and it can now see the XT-CF card and boot MSDOS.

I re-flashed the EPROM with different port address (300h) and the IBM 5150 can also see the XT-CF card and boot MSDOS!

something so simple... thank you so much Sergey for sharing your projects with the retro community.

cheers.

Henrique