The XT IDE can be used in any controller card that allows it to hook into that specific interrupt. For example network card works because of support for network boot. There are also Compact Flash and IDE controllers with this support. Basically anything where you can attach this EEPROM. I am using it currently in both ISA and PCI network cards (Realtek and 3COM). Thanks to this, I can have a 32GB SD card on the 486 and boot FreeDOS to the FAT32 filesystem.
These are the reasons why I got hooked on retro gaming and retro computing. The possibilities today are very broad. Some people like to stay "period correct", but I like to break the barriers and explore new horizons. For example I co-developed an active converter from USB to AT keyboard. Modern RGB mechanical gaming keyboard (with macro support) over USB works on 386 or 486, thanks to Teensy controller running at 90 Mhz. That is higher than the system CPU clock. You can even use a Bluetooth USB dongle. It will take any USB composite HID device and convert it to PC/AT or PC/XT. I did blow up the AmiKey keyboard controller on the motherboard once, though. That is the price for development. The reason was improper AT pin contact :-) Lukas On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 5:09 PM Frantisek Rysanek <frantisek.rysa...@post.cz> wrote: > On 23 Jun 2021 at 14:59, Lukas Satin wrote: > > > ... Get XT IDE eeprom and put it in Ethernet NIC for example to get > > > boot options even for 386 and bypass size limitations > > Oh I see, you mean this: > http://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/ > ...apparently the software project is still active :-) > > That's one lovely practical hack :-D > > My remaining ISA NIC's have ended up in the trash a few years ago. > > I'm wondering how much work it would be to inject this into an older > Award BIOS. If memory serves, ISA option ROM's somehow did not load > automatically... what did work was link the ROM as a PCI PnP option > ROM and insert it into the BIOS image instead of the original PCI NIC > option ROM (referring to its HW PCI ID's). Requires a NIC integrated > on the motherboard. No such procedure is mentioned in the XTIDE > docs... > > Frank > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user >
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