Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 08:22:25 -0400 (EDT) From: "Mike A. Harris" Reply-To: "Mike A. Harris" To: Joseph Morris cc: opendos AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: EDIT (and something bad.. but what?) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Organization: Total disorganization. MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Precedence: bulk On Tue, 13 May 1997, Joseph Morris wrote: > >>>Look, instead of arguing about this, let's try and do something > >>> constructive. > >>What??? Arguing??? You've read the thread TOTALLY wrong! I was > > Evidently I have, and I offer my apologies. Ok, no problem. Sorry for the long delay in replying. My inbox is really saturated but slowly coming back to normal. > >>> If Gene is listening, perhaps he could tell us what the newui > >>> does that might be unstable, so we could try some experiments > >>> to isolate the problem. > > >Probably the video mode. Looks like it uses a funny scanline > >mode or something. > > > >It is simple to disable the UI for now. > >>> Mine is a 5436 PCI, that other fellow's was a 5440. > (not a 5446 as I said earlier.) My friends 5446 2meg works fine with newUI. He has an AMD DX4-100 with nothing special. It was a cheap $55 card. Works good though. > >>> Both these apparently fail. > > > >Well, I've got a friend with a 5436 that it works on. > > ??? How can this be? Beats me, because I've now seen both a 5436 and a 5446 that work with NewUI and also I've seen the same models fail on other machines. Keep in mind it wasn't the same card in a different machine, but rather a different card in a different machine. Very strange indeed. Different steppings? Different video bios? Beats me!!! Very very strange. Then again, I've seen 2 Trident 8900 cards function differently before too. Must be some faulty cards out there I guess and some non-faulty ones. > Of two machines, OpenDOS crashed on one of them with a PCI CL5436. > These machines were about as different as they could be. > When the graphics cards were swapped, the other machine, now > containing > the 5436 crashed in the same way, each time NewUI programs run. Hmmm... > The specs of the two machines were: > > 150Mhz Intel Pentium > Ancient Triton VX motherboard > 32Mb RAM > PCI CL5436 video card with 1MB of RAM > Soundblaster AWE32 > 3.5 gig Maxtor EIDE disk and 1.6 gig Maxtor EIDE disk > 28.8 Modem > SCSI ZIP drive > Win95 I don't have the full specs of the machines that I've seen UI working on, but I doubt that it would make a difference, I think that some of the chips are flawed. > The other (now containing the 5436. On hand for experiments.): > > AMD K75 > Triton Spider motherboard > 16MB RAM > PCI ET6000 with 2.5 MB RAM > Win95-slaying dual soundcard configuration: > Jazz-16 soundcard for SB services and OPL3 > Wave Excel soundcard for MPU401 and WSS services. > Two Seagate Disks, 540Mb each. > Parallel ZIP drive > OpenDOS (from DRDOS 6.01) > > Now, I doubt it is the ZIP drive because it would be dormant until > the drivers are run, which won't happen on the OpenDOS setup disk. > The Parallel ZIP disk will have even less presence, and the problem > travelled _with_ the CL5436 anyway. Yeah, again, I think it is that some of the cards out there are faulty. Perhaps even a different stepping of the chips or something. Probably not hard to code around though. Mike A. Harris | http://blackwidow.saultc.on.ca/~mharris Computer Consultant | Coming soon: dynamic-IP-freedom... My dynamic address: http://blackwidow.saultc.on.ca/~mharris/ip-address.html Email: mharris at blackwidow.saultc.on.ca <-- Spam proof address URL: Art Bell - Coast to Coast AM http://www.artbell.com