DEC Multia VX51 almost working with NS3.3

[MindWalker]

Hi.

I have the aforementioned VX51 machine (P1 133Mhz, 96MB RAM, 4GB CF card as an IDE disk) which I've been building. It gives the vibe that it was primary meant to run Windows NT4.0, as that's the only OS where mostly everything works out of the box. (Everything but the SCSI controller is built-in).

The on-board networking was easy enough, drivers for "DECchip 21040" installed fine.

The graphics adapter (S3 Vision 968 2MB) took serious trial-and-error. It would cause black screen on all drivers I tried (even the NS's S3 Generic whereas the WinNTs generic S3 driver works just fine!) but finally I found that the "Number9 Motion 771 (PCI) 2 MB" drivers (Number9Motion771DisplayDriver.pkg) works (it mentioned the Vision 968 chipset in the nextanswers docs) and now I can run the system even in 1280x1024 with 256 colors which looks pretty nice!

I have still couple of issues that I am stuck with:

1) If I boot with the default option (press enter on boot loader) I get a black screen right after 'Reading NeXTstep configuration' and no disk activity at all. If I use the verbose mode (-v) I get the console screen in low-res and it will boot Ok. I went around this by setting 'Boot graphics' to 'No' (in /private/Drivers/i386/System.config/Instace0.table) and now it boots just fine (looks exactly like with the -v option) but... why?

2) I can't get audio working at all in NS. In WinNT sound works as a 'Microsoft Sound System' device on DMA0, IRQ9 and I/O 530. Using the built-in driver in NS (which I didn't expect to see!) with the same settings I get a slight crackle out of the speaker but also an error "MicrosoftSoundSystem: Improper hardware response, Revision (0x1f) mismatch" during boot. None of the other free IRQ or DMA work (says it can't allocate resource) for it either. (I did attempt to run this machine with Win95 earlier and I couldn't make the sound work in there either!). I couldn't see any later drivers for the MSS.

3) From time to time the CF-IDE- adapters activity LED lights up solid and everything stalls for 5-15 seconds (spinning cursor). This happens mostly in NS but sometimes in WinNT too so I presume this is something to do with the CF card (in Amigas this would be a case to adjust the MaxTransfer settings). Not sure what could be done with this one, I guess I could try another card or a real spinning disk.

I'd be happy to hear any ideas on these!

[Nitro]

I'm not an expert on any of this but I'll try to help with the troubleshooting if I can. For the video card issue check to see what PCI ID numbers that the video driver may be looking for during boot. Open the Default table file in the driver folder and look for the line starting with "Auto Detect IDs". Now compare that with the PCI ID for your video card. You can see all of the detected PCI IDs listed during boot, or you can look at the file /usr/adm/messages and scroll down near the bottom to see the IDs. If the IDs don't match, you can either add your video card's PCI ID to that line, or remove the ID number that's currently there. This process won't guarantee that the driver will work with your hardware, but it will prevent the driver from failing to load because it can't find the IDs that it's looking for. This works for other PCI devices as well. You can get a comprehensive list of hardware PCI IDs here:

https://pci-ids.ucw.cz/

If you download the pci.ids file you can search it with a text editor. Also check the other fields in the driver's Default.table file to see if any of them need to be modified for your video card.

The sound issue may be an IRQ conflict. Check out the following document for information on dealing with those conflicts:

https://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/Hardware/i386/Minding_Your_DMAs_And_IRQs.pdf

Also, many motherboards use an Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC) which adds support for virtual PCI IRQs above 15. Try turning that off if your BIOS has that option, and play with the IRQs until you find something that works. I had to turn off the onboard USB controller on one of my motherboards to get things working. Disable any onboard devices that you're not using to free up IRQs.

I have a CF drive in my NeXTstation Turbo Color (IDE > SCSI adapter). I'm using a Transcend 133 4GB card that works well (TS4GCF133). Check to see what transfer modes your card supports and see what modes your computer BIOS is using for the card. You may have to set the modes manually if the Auto setting is using the wrong mode. Also, open a NEXTSTEP terminal and try the idemodes command to see what NEXTSTEP thinks of the CF drive. OPENSTEP has the idemodes command and I think NEXTSTEP may too?

idemodes /dev/rhd0a

Also check to make sure that you're using the latest EIDE driver from the archives here.

I hope that helps you out. Let us know how it goes.

[MindWalker]

Thanks!

Check to see what transfer modes your card supports and see what modes your computer BIOS is using for the card. You may have to set the modes manually if the Auto setting is using the wrong mode. Also, open a NEXTSTEP terminal and try the idemodes command to see what NEXTSTEP thinks of the CF drive. OPENSTEP has the idemodes command and I think NEXTSTEP may too?

The BIOS in this machine is pretty limited. I had the disks on auto mode and the only setting it let me set was 32 Bit I/O on/off. The only other settings were not adjustable (Multi-Sector Transfers: Disabled, LBA Mode Control: Enabled, Transfer Mode: Fast PIO 2) but indeed when I set the disk type manually I was able to tweak those. I set the Multi-Sector transfers to 4 (NS was already using it at that according to the boot screen) and Fast PIO all the way to 4 (max). Now both NT and NS feel a bit snappier and I *think* it wasn't halting, at least not that much or for that long. So I guess this is at least better now.

The card is a SanDisk Ultra II (SDCFH-4096 HDX 4.32).

There was no 'idemodes' available. And yes I am running the newer EIDE driver already, forgot to mention!

[Nitro]

Good to hear; I'm glad at least some of that was helpful. Hopefully someone else will have some ideas.

[MindWalker]

I just tested whether running OpenStep 4.2 might give me any different results. I was happy to see that out of box it identified both the ethernet and graphics adapters correctly and had drivers for them. The automatic media detection (twisted pair, BNC, AUI, all of which are available on this machine) of the network driver did not work and I had to set it manually.

The audio system (MicrosoftSoundSystem) still doesn't work (but again so far I've had very little luck with it even on Windows installations on this machine).