Re: [Freedos-user] IDE <-> CF adapters
Hi, I have two CF adapters. A front side floppy size Startech one in an Athlon XP system that had an AsRock VIA motherboard until a few days ago when I upgraded it to an EPoX nForce 2 motherboard. Then I have another chinese one that is mounted on the back in an extension bracket on an IBM Aptiva P200 MMX with an Ali motherboard. I have never had any problem with any of these 3 motherboards. I have three kinds of CF cards. One 32Gb Sandisk that I use for FreeBSD and earlier for Windows XP and Arch Linux 32 on the Athlon, one 1Gb brandless one that came with an ALIX 2D3 that I use for FreeDOS on both PCs and a bunch of 2Gb and 4Gb Apacer ones for DR-DOS, MS-DOS, Windows NT 4 and Windows 95 on the Aptiva. All work fine on any combination. Note that microdrives also work in CF adapters but these are 3000 and some RPMs. So they are very slow. If I need a swap file, I'll just put it on a regular hard drive. I use a cheap Silicon Image SATA PCI card in the Aptiva and use it with a 160Gb hard drive from a laptop I upgraded to an SSD. Works great in NT4 and I can put the swap file on there. I have two 320Gb hard drives in RAID 1 with a 3ware 8006-@LP in the Athlon XP system and would just put the swap file on there if I needed one. You won't run into any removable bit problems unless you install something newer than NT4. Usually cards that don't have the removable bit set are those advertised as "Industrial". Windows XP will install without complaining on a CF with the removable bit set but some dumb software can refuse to install because of it. Linux and FreeBSD do not care whether the removable bit is set or not. No DOS family OS cares about that either. None of the BIOSes I used with the CF adapters treat the CF differently than a hard drive but I think that has more to do with the CF adapter than with the CF cards. Be warned that up to date Linux is bitrotting hard on 32 bit machines. I used to have Arch Linux 32 on the Athlon system and besides the problem of a lot of software throwing SIGILL because they are compiled with SSE2 instructions, the kernel is pretty unstable too last I checked. A lot of Linux people being paid by big corporations don't give a shit about testing on older hardware. I have since moved to FreeBSD which still works great on 32bit. Also up to date Linux will mostlikely not work with anything less than 128 Mb of RAM without X. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] IDE <-> CF adapters
Remember FAT16 partitions are limited to 2GiB in MS/PC-DOS. So, drives are limited to 8GiB. Check out industrial Flash modules or DiskOnModule. Read a little about them here: http://www.glitchwrks.com/2010/12/16/xtide Note: Expensive compared to more modern SATA devices. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=IDE+DOM=nb_sb_noss_2 Even some IDE SSD's. On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 4:48 PM Jon Brase wrote: > IDE <-> Compact Flash adapters seem to be popular for extending the life > of old computing hardware, and I'm looking at replacing the magnetic > disks on my old machines with CF. > > However, there seem to be issues with ensuring that the motherboard <-> > adapter <-> CF card chain is all compatible. I presume that there are > likely a fair number of people on this list that have already done this. > Can anyone provide recommendations as far as manufacturers/devices to > seek or avoid? > > Furthermore, I use Linux to administer my DOS machines (stuff like file > transfers to the rest of the network), and on the older of the two, the > Linux installation is quite swap-dependent. Obviously, the > write-lifetime limitations of flash memory are a concern here. Would it > be best to just buy a bunch of small CF cards and replace them as they > die, or to get a few over-large CF cards and rely on the card firmware > to do write levelling, or to just hold on to magnetic storage until I > can't find any more drives? > > Lastly, are there any good solutions for mounting multiple CF adapters > at the front of a 5.25" drive bay? Most of the adapters I've found that > seem to be meant for external mounting seem to either be meant to fit in > a rear PCI slot or to fit a single adapter at the front of a 3.5" bay, > but it seems like the dimensions are such that most adapters could fit 2 > wide x 2 high in a 5.25" bay if there were any way to mount them. > > Jon Brase > > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] Microsoft 8086 Assembler
The other day I decided to do some experimenting with the parallel port on my FreeDos machine, so I built an adapter with 8 LEDs connected to the output bits. It didn’t take too long to figure out how to turn the LEDs on/off using QBASIC. But I wanted to get a little closer to machine level control over the port. I decided to go with Microsoft’s MASM 6.11. Apparently, it was the last version that ran on MS-DOS. I liked the fact that it came with a lot of reference documentation. I did install it on my FreeDos 1.3 machine and get it working. I’ve been able to turn the parallel port bits on and off, etc. I installed MASM before I realized there are a couple of assemblers listed on the FreeDos software page. The Flat Assembler seems especially well supported. Is anyone here familiar with FASM? MASM is probably overkill for my purpose and like many other Microsoft products, their support for it is mainly reference material for experienced programmers. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.2/repos/pkg-html/fasm.html -- It's all fun and games until someone divides by zero. ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] IDE <-> CF adapters
I have bought about 25 of these and have only had an issue with one not working. Not a compatibility issue but a bad solder point on the connector. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Compact-Flash-CF-to-3-5-Female-40-Pin-IDE-Bootable-Adapter-Converter-Card/111977195791?hash=item1a125c690f:g:9Z8AAOSw3mpXGwt~ On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 4:48 PM Jon Brase wrote: > IDE <-> Compact Flash adapters seem to be popular for extending the life > of old computing hardware, and I'm looking at replacing the magnetic > disks on my old machines with CF. > > However, there seem to be issues with ensuring that the motherboard <-> > adapter <-> CF card chain is all compatible. I presume that there are > likely a fair number of people on this list that have already done this. > Can anyone provide recommendations as far as manufacturers/devices to > seek or avoid? > > Furthermore, I use Linux to administer my DOS machines (stuff like file > transfers to the rest of the network), and on the older of the two, the > Linux installation is quite swap-dependent. Obviously, the > write-lifetime limitations of flash memory are a concern here. Would it > be best to just buy a bunch of small CF cards and replace them as they > die, or to get a few over-large CF cards and rely on the card firmware > to do write levelling, or to just hold on to magnetic storage until I > can't find any more drives? > > Lastly, are there any good solutions for mounting multiple CF adapters > at the front of a 5.25" drive bay? Most of the adapters I've found that > seem to be meant for external mounting seem to either be meant to fit in > a rear PCI slot or to fit a single adapter at the front of a 3.5" bay, > but it seems like the dimensions are such that most adapters could fit 2 > wide x 2 high in a 5.25" bay if there were any way to mount them. > > Jon Brase > > > > ___ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] IDE <-> CF adapters
Hi! This indeed is a fun topic. CF "disks" are supposed to understand IDE and you can have purely mechanical adapters to use them with IDE controllers in your PC. But be aware that CF were originally popular in good digital photographic, so they are tuned towards writing a few, large files during a photoshoot, not for accessing many small files in DOS. I have tried to use a CF for temp files in Linux 10+ years ago with two goals: Give the mechanical harddisk the opportunity to spin down and save noise and energy and gain some speed. Neither of the goals really worked out. I had to kick a lot of apps and things to stop writing temp files to other places to get any resting periods for the harddisk and the CF often was slower than the harddisk for typical temp file activities, or it had to pause to do some bookkeeping once in a while. So do not expect spectacular results in DOS, but it still is fun to have a small memory card as DOS "harddisk" without big efforts. Well. If your CF properly boots. And if your CF does not self-identify as "could be swapped any moment like floppy disks" or anything like that. So things can still happen which confuse your BIOS or DOS, but it might just as well work :-) Robert has tried a few CF brands recently, so he will probably answer your question with more recent experiences than me :-) Regarding your Linux: On a modern computer, you probably want to use a RAM filesystem for temporary files. But you say you need a lot of swap, so this is probably no option for you. I can predict that if your swap is on CF, your Linux will be at least as slow as it was with a harddisk ;-) I would not worry too much about wearing out the CF: The swap is small compared to the total size of the CF and often it is how much you write in terms of multiples of total disk size which determines how long your flash media will work. Based on Robert's recent comments, I do not think that it will be a problem to acquire enough CF cards, in case you worry to wear them out too soon. If you want something more durable, you could probably invest into SD card adapters, although it will be more indirect - SD does not speak IDE, so the adapter has to have some built-in intelligence, unlike for CF to IDE. I have some adapters which just plug to one end of the IDE cable, but there also are adapters to plug directly into a mainboard. In both cases, you probably also need power, via floppy or harddisk style power connectors for example. You could probably just glue the adapter to some cardboard and stick that to a drive bay so things are not falling around? Regards, Eric ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
[Freedos-user] IDE <-> CF adapters
IDE <-> Compact Flash adapters seem to be popular for extending the life of old computing hardware, and I'm looking at replacing the magnetic disks on my old machines with CF. However, there seem to be issues with ensuring that the motherboard <-> adapter <-> CF card chain is all compatible. I presume that there are likely a fair number of people on this list that have already done this. Can anyone provide recommendations as far as manufacturers/devices to seek or avoid? Furthermore, I use Linux to administer my DOS machines (stuff like file transfers to the rest of the network), and on the older of the two, the Linux installation is quite swap-dependent. Obviously, the write-lifetime limitations of flash memory are a concern here. Would it be best to just buy a bunch of small CF cards and replace them as they die, or to get a few over-large CF cards and rely on the card firmware to do write levelling, or to just hold on to magnetic storage until I can't find any more drives? Lastly, are there any good solutions for mounting multiple CF adapters at the front of a 5.25" drive bay? Most of the adapters I've found that seem to be meant for external mounting seem to either be meant to fit in a rear PCI slot or to fit a single adapter at the front of a 3.5" bay, but it seems like the dimensions are such that most adapters could fit 2 wide x 2 high in a 5.25" bay if there were any way to mount them. Jon Brase ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
Re: [Freedos-user] Package discussion
>> googling "Andreas Bauer", first hit: >> https://www.bauer-kirch.de/kontakt/details/andreas-bauer/ >> >> which is about as plausible author as it goes. > > At least, it's a trace. We'll see. :-) > >> has anybody tried to contact him? > > I'll do so now. Got a reply today. Wrong Andreas. Will try some others. Cheers, Robert -- +++ BTTR Software +++ Home page: https://www.bttr-software.de/ DOS ain't dead: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/ ___ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
