Mail Archives: opendos/2000/10/31/15:21:31
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben A L Jemmett" <ben DOT jemmett AT ukonline DOT co DOT uk>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2000 3:36 AM
Subject: Re:
> How are they at disk I/O throughput? I had a machine a while back that
> would run anything based on iD's engine (DooM, Heretic et al), but a
couple
> of similar games just curled up around the middle of engine
initialisation.
> When I retired that hard drive (it's now doing a tour of duty as my
Netware
> 5 SYS: volume) and replaced it with something that could transfer a few
more
> Mb/s, everything ran fine.
I have an old 345MB Maxtor drive and they run fine. Although at the time I
bought the drive, it was not advertised, but it does have LBA mode 1 or 2, I
forget which it has. I used a driver for it (Drive Pro, I think) with the
386DX40 but do not need the driver with this board, it recognises it in the
BIOS and sets it correctly. My bother has a WD Caviar at 850 MB and his BIOS
supports LBA as well. His should be even faster than mine and should have
better throughput. I'll check it one of these days and see what the rate is.
Of course my SCSI drives are much faster.
> There are certainly problems with the 486 architecture - there's a TID
> somewhere in Novell's KnowledgeBase detailing a problem with lost and
> spurious interrupts on the 486 (NetWare, unlike most OSes, reports
> lost/spurious interrupts on the System Console). I think the gist of it
was
> that the internal handling was changed such that if you ignore one when
> processing another interrupt, the thing crashes. NetWare's problem was
that
> if the keyboard handler was active when the OS caught a lost interrupt,
the
> Console locked solid. *shrug* Also, I had a nasty abend yesterday in
> NetWare 5 (I think I've got a faulty DIMM in that machine, which has
really
> ticked me off), and the internal debugger reported 'Break to debugger
> because of break reason not set (80486 bug).' - on a P133, but never mind.
It may be a BIOS thing then, because both of these systems have 5x86-133
which are basically 486 chips which are improved. However, his is a Cyrix
and mine is an AMD, so he may have bugs I don't have. But I still think it's
that VIP board that is the problem plus the BIOS. Those VIP board did some
screwy things for bridging between ISA, PCI and VESA. I think that is his
main problem. It's a combination of the chipset and the BIOS. But why
certain DOOM WADs work and others do not is a mystery to me. Since they all
use the same engine and memory management. Go Figure.
> Of course, the Pentia have their own set of bugs - three nasty ones, IIRC.
> The classic FDIV, F0 0F (always good for security batch files), and
> something else to do with PCI and losing data in some circumstances.
There are probably updated BIOS to fix those problems. Also there may be
built in problems in the chipset. I know that is one of the problems with my
brother's computer. For some reason, the system detects more seraial ports
than there really are when he inserts his modem. I found a fix for it. The
fix requires removing one of the cip capacitors near one of the slots, I
think it's between the VESA and an ISA slot. But I cannot find out which MB
he has. It is a 6119 rev 1, but there were a lot of manuafutres that made
them and I cannot find the one that matches his MB layout. Not all of the
manufactures have pcitures of thier boards on their web sites. The BIOS
serial number list several vendors of the board as well. He is now backing
up everything he needs to keep and we installed an old 120MB drive out of
his old NEC 386DX33 box to put DOS and WINDOZE 3.1 on. Then I will install
NT on the 850MB WD drive for him, but because of problems he has had, we
cannot now get NT to install with WINDOZE 3.1. So I'll install the WINDOZE
95A that comes on one of his NT CDs and then let autorun install it for him.
While I have 95A installed I'll install Sandy, maybe that will find the
exact manufacture of his boatd and maybe it will also Identify the vendor of
his Trident video card. I cannot get his monitor (NEC 2A) to run in 800x600
mode with this monitor. It will run fine with my system and my monitor will
run fine on his system in all modes. Just another flaky setup. I may need to
try and change a junper on his video card to get it to work right with his
NEC monitor. I have used every other utility I can find to try and identify
these components, but none have been satifactory yet. He relly needs an
updated BIOS, but that would cost more than getting a much newer MB. I can
buy the best K6 MBs for about the cost of a BIOS update and he can even use
his old memory in them and later update to DIMM 100MHz. If I can find out
who made his MB, they might even send a new BIOS ROM to him for FREE. If I
knew for sure which ones would work I could get DREE ones from some of the
companies that made these M6119 MBs. A lot of vendoes will send the free of
charge. I updated my ZOOM modem and my video card this way. I did not even
have to pay postage and Diamond also sent me a set of manuals I lost for
free. Not even shipping charges. If and when I get this information and
figure out what to do with his problems I can probably help many other
people with similar problems. The nice thing about DOS is you can used old
MBs and have a good computer.
Pat
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