BridgeBoard A2286 with XT-IDE and VGA (XTIDE BIOS issues)

[hawkman]

I am working on adding a bridgeboard A2286 to my A2000 and I'm running into some problems, some of which may be due to my relative inexperience with the ISA architecture and others to the unique bridgeboard environment. The goal is to have a 286 class machine with VGA, sound and a CF-based IDE hard drive.

Currently, I have an 512kb Everex EV-633 (Tseng Labs ET4000, working and booting its own BIOS correctly) in a 16 bit slot and a XT-IDE-CF-Lite V4 (http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/xt-cf-lite) in a 8 bit slot. Vibra 16C sound card, not yet installed, will require me to modify one 8 bit slot to 16 bits. The A2286 has BIOS 3.5 right now. I have ordered a minipro, a UV eraser and a variety of different EEPROMs and EPROMs with the intent of finding something that works for upgrading it to 4.2.

The VGA is working great but I'm having some crazy issues trying to get the XTIDE to work. Per the link above, I can set the BIOS ROM to a fairly wide array of memory locations, but despite quite a bit of reading and trial and error, I haven't found anywhere that works properly.

Assuming I'm doing this correctly, I've been setting the memory jumpers, booting into DOS via the Janus hardfile, using the XTIDECFG.COM program to flash the IDE_XT.BIN BIOS onto the card by setting the memory address in the software settings, then flashing.

Setting the address to lower 0xCx000 addresses produces predictable conflicts with the VGA card. 0xC6000, 0xC8000 and 0xCA000 don't conflict but don't work either.

Where it gets weird is at 0xDx000, where the Janus area lives. The BIOS will write to there (because it's actually RAM shared with the Amiga I believe) and will in fact boot the CF card! Of course, it doesn't survive a reboot and kills the Janus software, in particular the mouse emulation.

Most higher addresses above Janus area either don't boot the XTIDE BIOS or aren't seen at all. As I haven't yet found a memory map for the A2286, I just worked my way through them with no success.

The BB software does allow changing the Janus area to A000 but doing that causes major VGA glitching so that doesn't look like an option. The XTIDE BIOS doesn't load anyway.

There are jumpers on the A2286 but the manual doesn't explain their function.

I was trying to follow some German discussions about XTIDE and BBs but I couldn't really make sense of what they were saying. Apparently there might be a modified BIOS out there.

So to summarise:

- Does anyone have documentation on the A2286 jumpers?
- Does anyone have a memory map of the A2286?
- Is anyone aware of an updated XTIDE BIOS that works with BBs?

Assistance or pointers much appreciated.

Thanks.

[LIV2]

Last time I checked it was necessary to disable the card's ROM and use the attached modified pc.boot file which contains a fixed xtide rom that works with the bridgeboards
You must place this file in sysc/system which will replace the existing file there.

I got this from a thread at a1k.org - this works for me with my 2386 and should work with the 2286 I think.

The 2088 needs a different file that may be in that thread I'm not sure.

There's also the possibility that a more recent version of the xtide bios fixes this but I haven't checked.

*EDIT* I believe you can also just flash the rom file attached to this post https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?th...40/post-855186

[hawkman]

Thanks for this. I have tried the pc.boot8088lite (combined Janus and BIOS) and yes, it does boot the card. However, something weird is going on that prevents ATIME and AMOUSE from working, the latter being more important. Using CheckIt, I only see 64K in the D000 memory range which doesn't seem right - I believe there should be 128K of dual-port RAM there.

That thread at a1k.org is very useful as it now becomes clear why the Bridgeboard has issues with the XT-IDE. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into solving this issue, but after reading through it, I'm not sure if anyone has solved the ATIME/AMOUSE issues - maybe I'm missing something?

I will give the other BIOS file a try and report back.

One quick question, there are two BIOS files in there, one which is 10K and bigger than the 8K BIOS EEPROM on my card, yet is called ide_xtl.bin. Does that imply XT-IDE-LITE, which is what my card is? If so, how does one fit 10K into a 8K BIOS? Or should I be using the 8K file?

*** EDIT ***

I used ide_xt.bin and AMOUSE/ATIME worked perfectly. For all A2286 / XT-IDE-LITE users out there, this is the working file. Thanks LIV2!

FYI, I rain CheckIt again and it still only shows 64K between D000h to E000h, with nothing in the 64K blocks before and after. With AMOUSE and ATIME working, I suspect that this was a red herring.

Thanks.