jr@oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) (07/23/88)
I know that there are some companies out there, such as Alloy, that make slave 286 cards that plug in a PC or AT bus. Typically such cards are designed for a "LAN-in-a-box" multiuser solution. I'm curious to hear from anyone who may have such a card whether any vendor is supplying decent enough documentation of the card all the way down to "bare metal" that one could run DOS on the slave card but a *different operating system* on the master. Also, does anyone sell a slave card with EGA on the slave? Any help appreciated. -- Jim Rosenberg pitt Oglevee Computer Systems >--!amanue!oglvee!jr 151 Oglevee Lane cgh Connellsville, PA 15425 #include <disclaimer.h>
madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost) (07/31/88)
In article <265@oglvee.UUCP> jr@oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) writes: |I know that there are some companies out there, such as Alloy, that make slave |286 cards that plug in a PC or AT bus. Typically such cards are designed for |a "LAN-in-a-box" multiuser solution. I'm curious to hear from anyone who may |have such a card whether any vendor is supplying decent enough documentation |of the card all the way down to "bare metal" that one could run DOS on the |slave card but a *different operating system* on the master. Also, does anyone |sell a slave card with EGA on the slave? I have used the Alloy system with v20 cards (not the new 286 cards). They provide *very* little low-level information. I believe that it would not be difficult to tear apart their code to figure out how the slaves communicate, but I don't have the time for that so I never did it. If you are looking to build your own software to use the hardware, this system is probably not a good place to start (although I didn't ask them if there was other documentation available). On a high point, their MS-DOS operating system works very well for most applications. New enhancements in their terminal drivers have made programs that do extensive video buffer writing operate reasonably. The documentation for the facilities they provide is about as good as that given by the PC Dos Technical Reference. There were some errors in the version of the documentation that I have, however, and their technical support has problems handling questions that deal with their datagramming services. In addition, I found that some datagramming methods will crash their routines, although good methods operate reasonably. Some of the datagram interface routines are poorly laid out and are impossible to use with high-level languages without some machine language. One such case is the datagram interrupt service routine interface, which calls the installed routine with a far call instead of an interrupt; compilers that handle ISR's invariably return with IRET, not RETF. It took about 20 lines of assembler (most of it out of the Turbo Pascal 4.0 manual) to build my ISR. If anyone would like information on the Alloy PC Slave system, I will give honest, educated answers. I have used and programmed the system extensively for over three years; I can comment on any service except their Novell emulation, which I have never used but which works fine with several products that I have tried. On a final note, the system I used was configured as follows: 512k IBM AT (10 MHz clock added) EGA 72 Mb hard disk (using Golden Bow's VFeature) 8 1Mb Alloy PC Slave/16 cards (3 different revisions) We use a variety of popular (and not so popular, eg DisplayWrite III) packages as well as a lot of custom software. jim frost madd@bu-it.bu.edu