Hans Otten wrote: > > Ah, you are not alone with IDE problems. > > I had some success with the unmodified IDE interface, software form Henrik > Gilvad and a Western Digital 6,5 Gbyte (nothing else lying around...). > Worked without problems for several weeks on a unloaded 8280. how sure are you about that? As long as the buffercircuitry has not been modified, the datatransfer can be corrupted. Especially when transporting #FF bytes through the cable, there might something go wrong... Most textfiles, etc.. do not contain #FF bytes and everything seems to go ok... > Then around xmas 98 is started playing with additional cdrom as slave and > that was not such a gooed idea, with other words, a disaster. While > experimenting the 8280 stopped working (due to a blown fuse to my relief, > too many reboots, works again like a dream...) if you connect the IDE cable in a bad way, you cause a short-circuit on 5V of your precious MSX. > So i was pleasantly surprised when Jon de Schrijder made new versions of the > bios etc available. Downloaded, installed and it never worked afterwards. > Not with the hard disk alone, and certainly not with the cdrom as slave. the new biosses perform a lot more checks and tests. > Do > note that i did not perform the hardware update yet. I can't express it enough: the hardware update is really necessary. It fixes both fan-out problems and IDE bustiming problems. > The disk went into the PC, its intended use, and i am looking for a cheap > but suitable disk for the IDE interface. Since the modified interface is capable of handling ALL (as far as I know) IDE harddisks, that won't be a big problem... > Do note that Jon (he is reading this maillist too!) warns about these kind > of problems, and did a great job writing new versions of the BIOS and also > telling us how to do a hardware update. > Hurray for Jon! 8-) More info: http://www.msx.ch http://www.faq.msxnet.org (chapter 13) I've also made a new textfile IDESYS.TXT, useful for IDE programmers (about IDE system variables and routines). Soon it will be on-line on the sites mentioned here above. About the LS120/ZIP: some DOSSCAN transferrates (MSX2): *Seagate 263MB harddisk: 243kB/s (7.16MHz) - 125kB/s (3.58MHz) *Iomega ZIP: 196kB/s (7.16MHz) - 113kB/s (3.58MHz) *LS120: 720kB floppy: 22kB/s (7.16MHz) *LS120: 1.44MB floppy: 38kB/s (7.16MHz Cool! A 1.44MB drive on my MSX :-) ) *LS120: 120MB floppy: 53kB/s (7.16MHz) I'm still busy with the new bios 1.90 that supports ZIP&LS. I have some problems with the 'diskchange' system. DOS2 doesn't seem to call the DSKCHG(#4013) routines before it reads sectors. It also acts in another way when in BASIC or in MSX-DOS2. Has anyone detailed info about the use of the DSKCHG(#4013) routine??? Jon BTW Here in Flanders, there is a television presentator; his name is also 'Hans Otten' :) **** MSX Mailinglist. To unsubscribe, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the body (not subject) "unsubscribe msx [EMAIL PROTECTED]" (without the quotes :-) Problems? contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] (www.stack.nl/~wiebe/mailinglist/) ****
