Re: [N8VEM-S100:6274] An updated (V3) version of our Dual IDE/CF card S100 bus board

[norwe...@aol.com]

All the suggestions sound pretty good for the updated IDE/CF card.  Would you also consider adding a label on the card silkscreen for the drive ID's?  (Along the top edge of the card?)  A big "A" and "B"??  It was not obvious (to me, anyway) when I first started working with the card, and I ended up putting a large, paper, sticky label there to identify the two "drives".

I also should report that I have still had no luck getting a ver. 2 card to work, and it is not because I'm at the "hi-tech." end of things.  I'm running it with a 4 MHz CompuPro CPU, and the serial card.  I wrote a CBIOS to try to get it working with CP/M 2.2, and it works ..... sorta'.  The CBIOS will permit me to run a "DIR" on the (7, as I remember it) CF drives, but try as I might, I was not able to get a "clean" listing.  There are a bunch of blank file names in the displayed directories.  When I run DU on those "drives", sure enough there are a few (4, as I remember it) sectors of zeros in with all the "E5"'s.  I used DU to "write" "E5" into those sectors, but then when I turn around and read and display them, they are zero!  Nothing I have tried has allowed me to write anything in those sectors.  They show up (probably at different places?) in all 7 "drives" on the CF.  I tried several different 8255's (along with the suggested mods. -- remove SIP, change 7403 to 74LS00, etc. etc.).  I did use NSWP to copy files into some of the CF "drives", and they appear to copy correctly in *most* cases, but there were also some strange things happening in some of the directory allocations for the resulting files .... in addition to the "zeros problem."

Roger