Thank you very much for your reply.
I got the ide 2 working with xt-ide.

Now I 'm having a weird issue with com port. I can't get it to recognise serial mouse. Ctmouse recognises both my serial mouses in mouse systems mode and mouse is not working in that mode.

Kekkula wrote on 2024-05-05, 14:22:

Thank you very much for your reply.
I got the ide 2 working with xt-ide.

I guess you need the XT-IDE Universal BIOS (XUB) because the IDE port you use is still responding to the secondary port address (170) and uses the secondary interrupt line (IRQ15). If you want to get rid of that, you would need to find out whether you can reconfigure the ISA IDE port to 1F0/IRQ14, so it will be supported by the mainboard BIOS. Except for support for the secondary address, there are other reasons to use the XUB, like big drive support (LBA), and if there are reasons you want to use XT-IDE anyway, you can just keep the configuration as-is.

Kekkula wrote on 2024-05-05, 14:22:

Now I 'm having a weird issue with com port. I can't get it to recognise serial mouse. Ctmouse recognises both my serial mouses in mouse systems mode and mouse is not working in that mode.

"Recognize" is a term that is too strong in case of Mouse Systems mice. In contrast to Microsoft mice that identify themselves as soon as you "power them up" by setting the modem control lines to appropriate level by sending the letter "M", Mouse Systems mice are completely silent and can not be recognized. To deal with this property of Mouse Systems mice, most serial mouse drivers that support mouse systems mice fall back to Mouse Systems mode if they don't get any response on the COM port they are told to operate on.

In short: Your mouse driver likely doesn't recognize anything, and because of that, it enables Mouse Systems mode.

The reason your mouse driver does not recognize the mouse might be that you are using the wrong kind of DE9-to-IDC-connector cable. There are two common mappings. While it is not a strict rule, a good rule of thumb is that the DE9 pins are mapped this way on Multi-I/O expansion cards:

12 4 6 8 .
21 3 5 7 9

which is the conventional order of pins on the pin header. On the other hand, integrated Super-I/O chips on the mainboard are typically wired to use this pinout

16 7 8 9 .
21 2 3 4 5

If you are using the correct kind of cable, you should have continuity between pin 5 of the DE9 connector and ground. Ground is also present on all metal parts on the computer chassis. In case this card uses the typical expansion card layout, it has ground on the central "lower" pin. If you use a connection cable designed for the newer "on-board I/O" pinout, that pin will be connected to pin 3 (the central pin of the 5-pin row) in the DE9 connector. So you can use a continuity tester to find out whether you are using the correct kind of cable.

Thanks again.
I didn't know that there are different kinds of serial ports.
I swapped the cable and now mouse works.
I'm using xt-ide because my suntac 286 motherboard bios doesn't support custom type hard drives. I configured io card to 1F0 , but forgot it to irq 15... Doesn't seem to matter, hd works.

Skorbin wrote on 2023-05-26, 07:52:

I have another strange beast here, which seems to be an earlier VLB IDE and multi-IO controller (pictures at the bottom) There i […]
Show full quote

I have another strange beast here, which seems to be an earlier VLB IDE and multi-IO controller (pictures at the bottom)
There is no name on it, just a "ML-863 P103" and "MADE IN TAIWAN" silkscreened on the frontside.
Stason.org lists it under https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-disk-floppy … ves-ML-863.html

What I found out so far (which is actually not much):
There is in general not much reference to the "MERVIN CT9000" chip around. I found a manual for a controller CL-9028Z, which seems to use this chip
I saw a post of a user named Artex here in the forum here, showing a "CL-9028Z P104" in his build. Indeed it seems to use the CT9000 chip, but the photo is a bit fuzzy.
The "P104" in the name of the card makes me wonder if it might be a successor of my card ("P103").

Currently I am hunting the very elusive driver called "ct9000.sys". I have only seen three references to it so far (the manual of the CL-9028Z, a guy in a google group searching for an OS/2 driver for that chip and a photo on an italian selling platform showing a screen of the hdd content with this file).

Frontside - total (sorry for the cables):
VLB Controller Frontside - total (with cables).jpg

Frontside - IO Chips:
VLB Controller Frontside - IO Chips.jpg

Frontside - IDE Chip:
VLB Controller Frontside - IDE Chip.jpg

Backside:
VLB Controller Backside.jpg

Ok, I got some more information now:
- The "CT" in the name of the chips seems to refer to Chaintech. I found an article which presents a Chaintech mainboard 586IPI.4 and it has the CT9100 chip as IDE controller. This time it is referred to as PCI component, so the CT9000 is probably the earlier VLB derivate.
- This seems to be confirmed by http://www.storagedrivers.com/drivers/211/211001.htm (found via wayback machine), which mentions a CT9000.ZIP file as HDD IDE driver for a CT9000, dated April 1993. The driver itself seemed to be located at driverguide.com, but I try to get there on the current website, I get website errors.

Anybody has access to driverguide and can get that driver (driver ID: 211001) and providing it for the vogons community?
I would really appreciate it, if that very elusive file would be uploaded to vogonsdrivers ...

Skorbin wrote on 2024-05-31, 13:02:

Ok, I got some more information now: - The "CT" in the name of the chips seems to refer to Chaintech. I found an article which p […]
Show full quote

Ok, I got some more information now:
- The "CT" in the name of the chips seems to refer to Chaintech. I found an article which presents a Chaintech mainboard 586IPI.4 and it has the CT9100 chip as IDE controller. This time it is referred to as PCI component, so the CT9000 is probably the earlier VLB derivate.
- This seems to be confirmed by http://www.storagedrivers.com/drivers/211/211001.htm (found via wayback machine), which mentions a CT9000.ZIP file as HDD IDE driver for a CT9000, dated April 1993. The driver itself seemed to be located at driverguide.com, but I try to get there on the current website, I get website errors.

Anybody has access to driverguide and can get that driver (driver ID: 211001) and providing it for the vogons community?
I would really appreciate it, if that very elusive file would be uploaded to vogonsdrivers ...

Nice info. I'll see if I can grab that stuff for you later today when I can get on a disposable computer outside any web filters.

I've seen pictures of these 1993 vintage VLB IDE controllers paired with Cirrus Logic VGA on a combo card:

• MERVIN CT9000
• VIDE-1
• Cirrus Logic PD7220
• ALI M5213
• Appian ADI/2

My understanding is that the PD7220 & M5213 are rebranded ADI/2 chips and both work with the ADI/2 Flexi driver, that was written for the AIC-25VL01Q chip (Also an ADI/2 rebrand) that Adaptec used on some SCSI controllers. Can you see if your card works with any of these ADI/2 drivers? Should just be a matter of extracting the .sys file and putting it in your config.sys. The Adaptec driver gives the best dialogs if I remember correctly.

http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2046 -- Adaptec ADI2 Flexi Driver v2.14 (ADI/2)
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2063 -- APPIAN TurboIDE ADI2 Fast IDE v1.15
https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2028 -- Future Domain PowerIDE! Drivers (Adaptec & ADI/2 )
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2029 -- IWill SIDEjr VL-Bus Fast IDE V1.4a (ADI/2)

It might take a while as my only VLB Board is still not yet set up.
It will be a snail anyway: it's one of the PCChips boards with fake cache.
But i will definately make the tests eventually.

Skorbin wrote on 2024-05-31, 15:55:

It might take a while as my only VLB Board is still not yet set up.
It will be a snail anyway: it's one of the PCChips boards with fake cache.
But i will definately make the tests eventually.

I understand. My VLB testing project has now lasted longer than the amount of time that VLB was a market share leader. These things happen. Are you using a PCChips M919 or something older?

Thinking about the driver, even if we do locate a copy of the CT9000.sys drive, expectations should be low. The 1993 drivers are usually not worth it. Expect modest gains, major incompatibilities. Generally speaking, I don't expect drivers that came out before June 1994 to work with drives larger than 512MB and I don't expect drivers that came out before 1996 to work with LBA. Sometimes the drivers can surprise you, but it's usually in a bad way.

If anyone else has a card with an Mervin CT9000 or a VIDE-1 controller, I'd be interested to hear if it works with an ADI/2 driver.

douglar wrote on 2024-05-31, 17:57:

My VLB testing project has now lasted longer than the amount of time that VLB was a market share leader.

Solid. Cracked me up.

douglar wrote on 2024-05-31, 17:57:

Skorbin wrote on 2024-05-31, 15:55:

It might take a while as my only VLB Board is still not yet set up.
It will be a snail anyway: it's one of the PCChips boards with fake cache.
But i will definately make the tests eventually.

I understand. My VLB testing project has now lasted longer than the amount of time that VLB was a market share leader. These things happen. Are you using a PCChips M919 or something older?
...

M912 ver. 6.0

I also have an Abit AN4, but that has seen some Varta action and is even older, if I remember correctly.
It is not unexpected that the potential gain of the ct9000.sys driver will probably be only marginal, but I want to try it anyhow. And if only for education purpose ....

@douglar - I tested the PDC20630 for you with the Marvell SATA bridge... It worked:

Results were quite good:

Random access time: 0.33ms
Buffered read speed: 10664 KB/s
Linear verify speed: 62349 KB/s
Linear read speed: 11020 KB/s
Linear write speed: 11135 KB/s

Card was tested with D0:M8 parameter with VG4.SYS version 3.2. VLB bus is set to 1 wait state (no choice - SiS VLB boards require it for stability). Second VLB card is the Trident graphics adapter.

mockingbird wrote on 2024-08-16, 03:03:

@douglar - I tested the PDC20630 for you with the Marvell SATA bridge... It worked: […]
Show full quote

@douglar - I tested the PDC20630 for you with the Marvell SATA bridge... It worked:

The attachment 20630.png is no longer available

Results were quite good:

Random access time: 0.33ms
Buffered read speed: 10664 KB/s
Linear verify speed: 62349 KB/s
Linear read speed: 11020 KB/s
Linear write speed: 11135 KB/s

Card was tested with D0:M8 parameter with VG4.SYS version 3.2. VLB bus is set to 1 wait state (no choice - SiS VLB boards require it for stability). Second VLB card is the Trident graphics adapter.

Nice. Those look like WDMA speeds to me. I'll have to get my stuff set up again and figure out what went wrong for me. Maybe my 32GB storage device was too large?

douglar wrote on 2024-08-16, 16:42:

Nice. Those look like WDMA speeds to me. I'll have to get my stuff set up again and figure out what went wrong for me. Maybe my 32GB storage device was too large?

I am testing with an Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 and Award 4.51 BIOS (I know, odd for a VLB board). My BIOS autodetection sees a 2GB drive and let's me choose LBA, I select that and then run FDISK from a floppy, which then sees the drive as 8GB.

Yes -- keep your drive to 16GB. I have found that older Award BIOS will not detect drives with larger capacities. I was scratching my head with my Pentium MMX system over why it wasn't detecting my bridged SATA drive only to discover that I was attemtping to connect a 120GB drive. It ignored it completely.

Oh, and it works as well with the 88SA8050, so nothing special about the 88SA8040, other than that it is SATA150 as opposed to SATA300. I think VG4.SYS is preferable to XUB, even if XUB did support the PDC20630 (which it doesn't -- it only supports the PDC20230), because VG4.SYS loads into high memory (and only consumes 7K at that).

I think Marvell swallowed up Promise at some point, because they shared logos on late Promise PCI ICs:

...and maybe that's why they work well together here.

mockingbird wrote on 2024-08-16, 17:35:

I think Marvell swallowed up Promise at some point, because they shared logos on late Promise PCI ICs:

Marvell acquired a company named "Promis" a coupler years back, but not "Promise Technologies"

Has anyone ever seen one of these?

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/promise-pm-105

I'm not spotting a match here:

https://fcc.report/company/Promise-Technology-Inc

Yes.
PDC20630 based controller.
A cheaper, BIOS-less design compared to EIDE2300Plus.
Similar to P2630VL-1, but even more compact layout.
Nothing to see there in my opinion.
They come and go from time to time on ebay for cheap.

Does anyone have a VLB IDE controller working in MWDMA mode in Win9x ?

So I have a card with the UM82C871F chipset where I can jumper the timings. I can set the "act time" (Active Time) between 3 and 18 cycles. I can set the "rec time" (Recovery Time) between 4 and 19 cycles.

Are these the standard ATA timings ?

1PIO  Cycle    Active   Recovery
2Mode Time(ns) Time(ns) Time(ns)
30    600      290      310
41    383      290      93
52    240      165      75
63    180      120      60
74    120      100      20

Which means at 33 Mhz, setting Act = 3, Rec = 4 would result in Act = 90ns, Rec = 120ns, which could be a little better than ATA2
Which means at 50 Mhz, setting Act = 3, Rec = 4 would result in Act = 60ns, Rec = 80ns, which could be close to ATA4

Did I do that right?

Which VLB card drivers can support hard drives larger than 420mb in Win3x ?
Which VLB cards work best in Win95 ?

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2024-11-18, 16:55:

Which VLB card drivers can support hard drives larger than 420mb in Win3x ?
Which VLB cards work best in Win95 ?

For VLB IDE controllers, I'd recommend two options--

Get one of the early ones that allow you to adjust the drive timings with jumpers so you can stick with generic drivers like the MicroHouse 32bit storage driver
--or--
Go with QDI vision 6580 or Promise 20630 based controllers that have native support in XUB and have Win95 drivers that support drive geometries with more than 16 heads

The Promise 20630 controller can do MWDMA2 transfers in DOS if you have a storage device that's agreeable to that mode, but I've had little luck getting that to work as DMA in Windows.