chris@egghead.East.Sun.COM (Chris Kordish - Norwalk CT SE/SysAdm) (01/23/91)
hi there,
Some time ago, I put an accelerator board in my "vanilla" IBM XT
BIOS sig date is 5/10/86. The accelerator board the DAC Breakthru 286-12
once installed in my system now causes booting problems. Upon booting
I see no screen output at all and my system goes "out to lunch" just hanging
there doing nothing - until I re-cycle power and then it finally comes up.
Will changing the BIOS help - can anyone make any recommendations as to what
kind of BIOS to use - will I be losing any functionality ??
Another couple of questions:
1) tis true the 8086/8088 can address up to 1Mb of memory
but can anyone tell me what things that "non-conventional" memory
is used for ( i.e. the 384Kb that i think holds screen addressing memory
and some other things....what are these other things - can anyone
provide a list
2) SLOT 8 on a "vanilla" IBM XT - Can I use any card in this slot ? Or is it
dedicated for use with maybe an IRMA type of card or some other kind of
communications/protocol transfer device. Reason I ask is because
I would like to place a 720KB floppy controller in this slot and want
to know if this is OK ( all other slots are filled )modem,CGA,I/O-Clock,
BREAKTHRU286-12,EMS RAM card,HD drive controller,FD controller,open
jwbirdsa@amc-gw.amc.com (James Birdsall) (01/23/91)
In article <4011@eastapps.East.Sun.COM> chris@egghead.East.Sun.COM (Chris Kordish - Norwalk CT SE/SysAdm) writes: >2) SLOT 8 on a "vanilla" IBM XT - Can I use any card in this slot ? Or is it > dedicated for use with maybe an IRMA type of card or some other kind of > communications/protocol transfer device. Slot 8 on the original IBM XT is not interchangeable with other slots. According to a technical reference I dimly remember reading, the card in slot 8 must respond with a "card selected signal" when selected. In the years since then, I've never figured out what this was supposed to mean. I have tried lots of cards in slot 8. The only one that has ever worked is an original IBM serial port card which has a jumper for slot 8 operation. I believe there was also an IBM 3270 card which had a switch for slot 8 operation. Cards which have failed to work are: video cards, drive controllers, other serial cards, parallel port cards, memory cards. Translation: it's almost useless. :( -- James W. Birdsall WORK: jwbirdsa@amc.com {uunet,uw-coco}!amc-gw!jwbirdsa HOME: {uunet,uw-coco}!amc-gw!picarefy!jwbirdsa OTHER: 71261.1731@compuserve.com ========== "Think of an animal that's small and fuzzy." "Mold." -- RM ========= =========== "For it is the doom of men that they forget." -- Merlin ===========