Jack, Yes, 40:8f might be wrong in VirtualBox and yes the person who set it to the wrong value may even be in your "BIOS Central" style group of 40:8f users. But for example the IBM PS/2 and PC Technical Reference (official 1991 IBM docs) clearly describes 40:8f as RESERVED byte in the BIOS Data Area chapter, so you are still walking on thin ice with UIDE. Of course the same reference book also describes ints 13.15 & 13.16 when it comes to proper floppy change checks.
Again, using int 13 instead of 40:xx would have avoided all UIDE troubles - even on VirtualBox. Another interesting thing is that the VirtualBox PCI BIOS seems to scan all possible 256 PCI bus numbers while it also states that it only has one such bus at the moment. MAX_BUSDEVFN could thus be lowered to 100h instead of 10000h which could mean 256 times faster UIDE load times. If this is true, PCISLEEP style PCI bus scans would be even faster (up to 8 times) compared to even the possible 256-fold improvement through VirtualBox BIOS tweaking, compared to 3 minutes in UIDE-VB. Of course it would be interesting to contact some VirtualBox experts about whether MAX_BUSDEVFN is indeed too high (PS: pcibios.inc and pcibio32.asm should probably derive the CL returned by int 1a function b101 from MAX_BUSDEVFN for consistency) and about whether orgs.asm line 1137 & 1147 CODE should be changed, to reflect the missing change- line support, or whether only the COMMENT should be changed if this bit is about 80 track support rather than change line support! Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
