Hi Folks,
Just another quick progress report. I managed to get a few hours of uninterrupted time yesterday and continued to have more success.
Although the code is a complete disaster, I now have full read/write functionality. I am running the SCSI2IDE from my Xi 8088 with a Future Domain adapter that has a boot ROM. I am able to run DOS from the SDSI2IDE with no problems. Reading and writing data between the host and my CF card seems to be rock solid. I even ran an Adaptec utility that does a read/write test and it worked fine. At present, I am dumping a lot of diagnostics with every command including portions of data, so it is very slow. Additionally, I have not implemented the pseudo-dma mode. I am nowhere near working on performance -- that comes last.
The only anomaly I have observed is that DOS 6.22 FDISK reports "No space for DOS partition on drive" when I try to use it to create a primary partition. However, I am completely successful if I use DOS 3.3 FDISK to create the partition, then use DOS 6.22 to format the partition and make it bootable. I see odd command requests from the host when trying to use DOS 6.22 FDISK to create the partition and suspect there is something about the ROM in my adapter that is problematic for newer versions of DOS. To be clear, the command requests are valid SCSI commands, it is just that they don't make sense given what FDISK is supposed to be doing.
I will try to get the code straightened out enough to post an update on the Wiki in the next few days. We are very close to the point where it will be helpful to get others running this "alpha" code on a variety of different systems for compatibility testing. I'm hoping some of you folks can help with that.
Thanks,
Wayne
Just another quick progress report. I managed to get a few hours of uninterrupted time yesterday and continued to have more success.
Although the code is a complete disaster, I now have full read/write functionality. I am running the SCSI2IDE from my Xi 8088 with a Future Domain adapter that has a boot ROM. I am able to run DOS from the SDSI2IDE with no problems. Reading and writing data between the host and my CF card seems to be rock solid. I even ran an Adaptec utility that does a read/write test and it worked fine. At present, I am dumping a lot of diagnostics with every command including portions of data, so it is very slow. Additionally, I have not implemented the pseudo-dma mode. I am nowhere near working on performance -- that comes last.
The only anomaly I have observed is that DOS 6.22 FDISK reports "No space for DOS partition on drive" when I try to use it to create a primary partition. However, I am completely successful if I use DOS 3.3 FDISK to create the partition, then use DOS 6.22 to format the partition and make it bootable. I see odd command requests from the host when trying to use DOS 6.22 FDISK to create the partition and suspect there is something about the ROM in my adapter that is problematic for newer versions of DOS. To be clear, the command requests are valid SCSI commands, it is just that they don't make sense given what FDISK is supposed to be doing.
I will try to get the code straightened out enough to post an update on the Wiki in the next few days. We are very close to the point where it will be helpful to get others running this "alpha" code on a variety of different systems for compatibility testing. I'm hoping some of you folks can help with that.
Thanks,
Wayne