Uncreative Labs

Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 3:40 am

First i'd like to say, Thank you for the help i've been recieving in the forum. Though i do post ALOT

I seem to be having an issue finding specs on a couple of cards and drivers for one of them

Intel Above Boards

I have one that appears to be an above board at, but the driver disk sees the memory on the board, but refuses to configure it, may because i was trying to use it in a 386, not a 286.

Also have an
Above Board PS AT, 1.5mb on board, with serial and parallel, stason doesn't have jumpers for it, and google turns up nada, intel has a driver disk for it but i'm not sure since the file says Win95 on it. I just got a 286 AT clone and would like to get it working, using the above board/boards.

Help?

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Seems like I remember Walter (DeGroot) having quite a bit of experience with Above-boards, you may want to PM him, or maybe he'll pop-in soon...

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I have a couple of these boards ( somewhere)
and they are of the 16 bit ( huge size)
they will start at a fairly LOW memory, possible as low as 512
and are limited to a MAX of 16 megs,
work properly on a 386 or 496 with a std 8 mhz at bus.
think there was a jumnper for xt use not sure
the boards remembered the settings
meaning if you used on on a 3/486 with 8 m ram and a year later you plugged it in another 3/486 with 8 mb ram, it would clock up to 18 m
8 + 8 m
no battery
but if the system had different ram
it needed to be reconfigured to starting and ending ram.
more than one board could be used as long as the max was not above 16 mb
at that time I asked intel and they were not going to provide more newer software
REMEMBER tois is a program you run and set the board to
NOT a cmos setting
the ram on that board does not appear in cmos.

these are boards that are " more ram" boards"
a 286 can only address 16m
when the board is used in a 3/486 it is still limited to 18m ( including the ram on the mb)
I believe SOME ram was needed on the mb.
meaning you could NOT use two 8mb boards and zero on the mb,
BUT IT MAY be possible to have too much ram and the system will only SEE up to 16m
like 4mb on the mb and two 8mb boards. not entirely sure.
I do not think it will cause a lockup anyway.

i will look for the drivers. chances are good I still have them.
In my case I would look for 4m 30 pin ram and set the system up for either 16+4=20 or
possibly 16 +16=32
most old mb peak out with 16mb or 20 mb and that is a sweet spot for windows 3.1

there were boards that adeded a 386-16 to an xt
a cable 40p from board to mb was required a special version of windows was also required.
.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I cannot find the drivers either on the www or on my backup cd's
will keep looking.

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 3:06 am

Thank you Wdegroot, if you can find the drivers, that would be awesome, VERY awesome, while i have you though, i've another card that is of curiosity.

It is an 8bit scsi card with bios
Storage Dynamics Inc.
SDi T1008 Half-Pint

It's a VERY small card,

10 chips, a 50pin internal connector and a 25pin external connector
Nada found on it..

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

a rare one
this raises the possibility of have a scsi drive bootable
on an xt
but the usual restrictions such as drive limits may be a problem
remember the 528 was an IDE limit
and the 2049 limnit was a 16 bit dod limit
it might be interesting to see
if an xt ( patch in a 3.5" drive, it will work as a 720k and see if a w 98 boot disl will see the card
remember the xt and early systems DID NOT have any kind of PNP
but any ibm bios AFTER the original PC did have allowances for " bios extensions"
meaning xt hd controllers and ega and vga cards which all required a bios.

I asked M brutman to look for a driver and will continmue to look here
I think my last use of the cards was before 1996.
I was given a fast 486 while in the hospital while getting bypasses added to my heart.

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 9:42 pm

Thank you

As for the 3.5inch 720, i have a 4 floppy drive 8-bit controller, High Density, it works in the XT, to an extent, i need to find a way to completely disable the XT's built in floppy seek routine, it interferes with the cards own jumper settings, but i'm thinking i can rig it, so that the xt uses it's own controller for drive a, and the other one, for the secondary channel for the 2 other floppies, and i just came across 1 set of half height mounts for the xt aswell
it's called UNIQUE FDC, multi fdd controller, set the drive types with jumpers, self explanatory there

I have another one
It's called the SYSGEN PSA 1030, it too appears to be a FDD controller, but each connector can accommodate up to 40 pins, but the final 6 on each connector are not soldered in, makind 2 standard floppy plugs AND the external floppy plug. This thing is almost as mysterious as my PROCOM fdd controller EXTENDER card. Thats another ball of wax entirely.
The Sysgen PSA 1030, has clearly marked jumpers in it. 1 jumper block has the markings of a power connector,+12V GND GND +5V in that order
Next it has a curious one AT or PS2 jumperable, and it gives the choice of it's io address being selectable. I believe its a high density controller, because of the at/ps2 jumper setting, but i can prolly XT it with the 2M extension program, given it's configuration, i wonder if it can support more than 4 floppies..

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

the db37 on the rear of the xt original connector
do not know of a 40 except scsi
"seek routine" " 2 floppy controllers"
WHY
one should be enough
if the card has an external connector a db37 mating connector with a 34 wire ribbon and the ribbon displaces to the side ( think pin 1 remaind pin 1)
will permit use of 4 floppes
IF younuse the mb switches
BUT then the hard drive letter will be come d or e.

avoid the DTK card as it has problems.

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

Thanks to Walter for giving me a heads up - I don't check in here as often as I should.

I have two diskette images for the Intel Above Board. The can be found here:

http://www.brutman.com/intel_above_board_286_v41.zip
http://www.brutman.com/intel_above_board_v40a.zip

Make a copy - this is a limited time offer. And let us know which one works.

Mike

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 4:53 am

Thank you for posting those, the disks look similar, but i think the actual files may be different, i will try them both and see which gets it to work out, should be in a day or 2 Smile

Again, thank you

Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 6:25 am

The disks work Smile

Thank you
I've also came across an above board that can sport 8mb ram aswell, that too works wonderfully

And now to my next question....

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I have no idea what this XP board "drive seek" is
I had xt's and xt'a intill everyone els had 386's
and never heard or experienced this
we also had several different xt 8 bit high density controller cards.
none conflicted
the DTK card was taken back as it would either format 720k or 1.44m properly depending on switch settings BUT NOT both
likely screwed up bios.

I even tried to buy a wd-fox card.
there were 4 kinds. and I wanted the one with a bios and was sent the card with a connector and no chips
I specifgically asked for a -4 ?
and gotr a -1 ?
thought it would be better than the
clone cards.

there were issues with floppy data transfer speed and I hoped the wd card was the faster speed.
this didn't occur until they made faster mb.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

wdegroot wrote:

I have no idea what this XP board "drive seek" is
I had xt's and xt'a intill everyone els had 386's
and never heard or experienced this
there were issues with floppy data transfer speed and I hoped the wd card was the faster speed.
this didn't occur until they made faster mb.

I love drive seek, I setup all my systems (that I can) up to PIII's to do a floppy drive seek on bootup so I know they have started, all it is is the floppy drive is activated and grinds in and out (aka seeks for media)

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

yes I frequently use floppies and one of the main pc problems is that the floppy does not work
even after a perfect re-format.

BUT since there is no cmos setup on an 8088 machine
there is no way to set up seek or no seek
unless either the hardware or the bios could be edited. and I don't know how that could be donme.
even on early machines ( I don't have one handy)
I do not think it was an option in setup.

Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 5:00 am

there is one jumper on the original XT floppy controllers, i think i asked this once, but what's that do? doesn't that turn the seek on and off?