XTIDE tech support thread

[Krille]

Cheers, lads. First post.

Welcome to the forum!

Is the CF card detected by the BIOS? If not, upgrade the XTIDE Universal BIOS to the latest version available from here.

[RetroDan]

Welcome to the forum!

Is the CF card detected by the BIOS? If not, upgrade the XTIDE Universal BIOS to the latest version available from here.

Actually, not long after I made this post, I realized what was happening. The DeluxeFloppy and the XTIDE were both competing for the same address space. By swapping the XTIDE from C800h to D800h, everything worked together quite nicely. I've removed the original 360k floppy and the 10MB MFM hard drive, and it's quite the nifty little thing now.

I can't believe how much I forgot about these computers over the last thirty years...

[gepooljr]

Is it possible to substitute the ROM on a Promise ATA 33 PCI card for an XTIDE ROM and work correctly? My experience with ISA controllers has always been good, but I've never tried a PCI Card Controller/ROM slot on a PCI Network card.

Thanks!

Geoff

[maxtherabbit]

I've not tried it either, but it *should* work

[retrocopter]

Thanks a lot for making the XTIDE BIOS!

I just installed the latest version (r604, 2020-12-15, ide_386l.bin) on my HP Vectra 386/20N: I configured it and burned it into an EPROM that I placed into the mainboards network boot ROM socket.
Works flawlessly!

However, there is one inconvenience: The boot up-process is too fast!
After the drive detection the default choice is (drive C in my case) is booted immediately - which is not a lot of time to intervene on this machine.
I know that the boot menu timeout can be configured, but it only applies if you actually enter the boot menu manually, by pressing F2.

Is it possible to have more time, by either...

• Having a configurable delay/timeout after the drive detection? I.e., more time to select an option via the hotkey menu.
• Having the boot menu as the default choice on bootup? As far as I can see, I can configure the default boot drive to be the first floppy drive with 00h or the first HDD with 80h, but how to default-select the boot menu?)

[Malc]

....Is it possible to have more time, by either...

• Having a configurable delay/timeout after the drive detection? I.e., more time to select an option via the hotkey menu.
• Having the boot menu as the default choice on bootup? As far as I can see, I can configure the default boot drive to be the first floppy drive with 00h or the first HDD with 80h, but how to default-select the boot menu?)

It is possible yes but a custom build of the bios will be needed, The default timeout for the HotKeyBar is about 4 seconds, To change this you will need to edit the HotKeyBar.inc source file and rebuild the bios, To have the BootMenu as the default you will need to Remove " Module_HotKeyBar " from the appropriate section of the makefile and rebuild the bios.

[retrocopter]

Hi Malc, thanks for your response!

I had a look at the source code before, but couldn't figure out if there is such a timeout at all.
After your response I did some more digging and found "MIN_TIME_TO_DISPLAY_HOTKEY_BAR" in "HotkeyBar.inc" which contains exactly those 4000ms you mention, defined in ticks.
As far as I can see, this number is processed as a 16 bit integer.

During the weekend, I will play around with it, modify it and build the new BIOS.
I will give feedback if it actually works.

[Malc]

It should work, I remember having to do the same a long time ago for my 486 with CRT monitor, By the time the display came up it had already timed out, I prefer to do my own builds and mainly use the bootmenu.

[andromeda92]

Does it exist changelog for xt-ide bios ?
what is the difference between bios R602 and bios R604?

[Malc]

Does it exist changelog for xt-ide bios ?
what is the difference between bios R602 and bios R604?

If you go to the XUB website, Click on "Browse Source" in the menu, Click on "View Changes" button at the bottom left, And from there you can get the changeset for any revision you want.