Uncreative Labs

Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2009 3:29 am

To all of you that have gotten it to work right. HOW i can't get it to properly function, whenever optimize is done, nothing is loaded high and the screen gets all gibberishy, with the mach 20, AND my ast board. i'm thinking it may be my video card, it's an 8-bit WD-VGA. i'm going to try helix again to see if that makes a difference

Posted: Sun Nov 22, 2009 4:26 am

*update*

It now refuses to see the SCSI card, Future Domain TMC850-MEX, it will work without qram, so i believe qram is causing it to misfire so to speak. Any reasonable solutions?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Well, you are certainly having an interesting problem.

As you are using a Future Domain SCSI card without a BIOS, I can see a potential problem there, because I believe after you have loaded a driver for it, it will use upper memory blocks for transferring data. You should find out what range the card needs, and then tell QRAM to exclude that region.

I really doubt that your 8-bit WD VGA card is the problem. I have ran QRAM 2.x on a 5150 with a WD Paradise 8-bit VGA, AST RAMpage! and Future Domain TMC-850M SCSI. I know that with the AST card, certain versions of REMM.SYS work much better than others. I can't remember which the best one is off hand though.

I know IBM PC-DOS comes with a tool called Qconfig that tells you where you adapter ROMs are located. I believe the Manifest (MFT) program that comes with QRAM can also do this. I think by examining the data in MFT, you might be able to troubleshoot your problem. Your config.sys and autoexec.bat might help too.

Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 5:43 am

the tmc doesn't have a bios, i got remm set up the way i want it too but i have to read up on qram's parameters for the .sys file. remm is 4.31

The tmc850 has irq 3 and 5 switchable, can't use 3, even though it's disabled the ast board doesn't want to let it go, and the tmc doesn't like 5, i don't know why, might be because i can't get it a driver address that is valid. qram sucks up everything above C000, incidentally i have the tmc set to ca00 or e800, the only addresses that the mach 20 *without memory* will let it see. Manifest works rather well at describing available rom areas, but like i said, i don't know qram's parameters and optimize doesn't let me choose exclusions, that or i don't know how to do that

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I've found that OPTIMIZE is borderline useless. If you want QRAM to work properly, you'd better read that nice manual of yours and figure out how to exlude memory regions.

You indicated that QRAM was sucking up everything above C000, but that your SCSI card uses either CA00 or E800. To me that indicates that QRAM is overwriting the area that your SCSI card needs to operate.

Typically soundcards use IRQ5, and sometimes parallel ports use it as well. Personally I configured my SCSI card not to use an IRQ.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

By any chance are you running both an MFM and SCSI controller in your system?

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 12:26 am

ya, actually, that is exactly what i am attempting to do, as my tmc-850mex has no bios on it, and the next full height scsi i have is currently in use, that reminds me, i think my western digital mfm is set to IRQ 5, what do i do if it is? i know irqs are kinda tight, but i KNOW i can make this work, i'm itching to give it my 3Com etherlink II i just got for it. i can look up the specs for the hdd controller to see if it will take any other irqs.

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 12:26 am

howd you set up your 850 NOT to use an irq?

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 12:51 am

just found out something hideous, my wd1002a/wx1 doesnt have a jumper for irq, nada, zip, just empty solder pads

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Just remove the jumper on the block that selects IRQ on your SCSI card. Also, make sure you are loading the correct driver. I believe that the card comes with two drivers. One is for operation with IRQ, and the other is without.

I believe for operation without IRQ, you should use the MCAM950.SYS driver. It takes no parameters

device=mcam950.sys
device=fdbios.sys

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 1:06 am

not sure if i have the right one, i use powerscsi to install the drivers

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Try mcam950. You really can't rely on automatic configuration to make everything work...especially on an XT.

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2009 1:19 am

hmm, i will do that and get back to you, might be a while, switchin back and forth between compute, thank you for the advice Smile

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 12:10 am

ok, got the card to work, it's on irq 3, the serial port is on irq 4, that leaves me irq 7 and i believe 2 to dink with. But i can't get qram to stop allocating the scsi cards mem address for it's own usage, i don't know how to exclude it from qram, it's set to E800 i believe, qram writes everything from Drange on up and the future domain doesn't line anything in the Crange

Edit, found an awesome site that has parameters for all the QEMM files and such, figured out how to get it to exclude the FD850 addresses. I'm now looking into how to get it so that i can turn about 256kb of that 1mb EMS into XMS, unless u guys know anyone that's got the daughter board for an AST Sixpack Premium

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2009 12:34 am

Heres the link

http://mail.nfbnet.org/files/memory/QEMMHELP.TXT