Date: Wed, 29 Jan 1997 11:00:00 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: jlemon@americantv.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 2.2-BETA Questions Message-ID: <199701291800.LAA12267@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <1867.854550881@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 29, 97 07:14:41 am
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> > > I finally got purchase authority to build the ultimate spam box from > > > hell - two IDE HDs, an IDE CDROM drive, a SCSI HD and CDROM drive, all > > > in the same box. I'm going to load DOS and Win95 on different drives > > > > Build? Just go and buy a Packard Bell computer. That should give you a > > pretty good start. :-) > > I thought of that, but I wanted something even funkier. Something > which personified the very worst of every box I've seen paraded > through this group. Packard Bell comes amazingly close to this in an > out-of-box configuration, I'll agree, but in the end they just weren't > quite Funky Enough. :-) Make sure the IDE controller does not support LBA, get a bigger than 512M IDE drive anyway, and install the OnTrack 7.x stuff to load BIOS-based translation and LBA support onto the thing. Oh yeah: get an IDE controller without the shift registers between the slot and the IDE bus, and make sure it uses a CMD640b chip. That way it can be both electrically unreliable, and lock up when you sneeze at it because of the channel interleave bugs on the CMD. Also, your master drive should be non-WD, and your slave should be WD (so that it won't even work under Win95, because WD can't make drives that will slave for other manufacturers because the IDE spec isn't strict enough). Make sure you load the "standard" ATAPI drivers from one vendor, but install the CDROM drive from another... preferrably something you buy for $17 at www.onsale.com because the drive is one of the first 1x IDE CDROMs ever manufactured. Make sure that, internally, it's wired like a Micron Home MPC (ie: the sound output from the CDROM goes through an interrupt hungry sound card that is not quite SB compatible). Definitely install a floppy tape drive, and if you can get one, use the IOMega parallel to SCSI converter as your SCSI interface. Finally, make sure you install PnP ISA cards, but that machine doesn't have a PnP BIOS, so that the OS has to make the PnP I/O calls to get them configured. Be sure the thing has an onboard bus mouse port that uses IRQ 12, and the video card outputs vertical retrace on IRQ2 so the PnP operations will stomp on these interrupts without seeing them... PS: Saturn I/Neptune I/Mercury I chipset for PCI, if possible, so that you don't get PCI DMA cache invalidation signals; too bad you can have an EISA/PCI with both a bogus Intel chipset and the HiNT chipset -- cut the traces for memory bus to slot connections for data lines 25-32, if you have to, to get the same effect. PPS: Don't forget: The Pentium you install should have the FPU bug. PPPS: If you are running an Intel motheboard, get SIMMs with gold contacts; if not, get them with lead. PPPPS: Too bad you can't install VLB bus mastering controllers in a system with PCI slots... then you could really go to hell in a handbasket, since only one of them would require the driver to invalidate the DMA target cache for it because it wasn't in a "master" slot. Actually, if you could get one of the original Gateway or Dell P60 boxes with the 1G IDE drives, you'd almost have all this. As a bonus, you'll have some nice cooling problems with the CPU. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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