It's an ALi M5229, which is an Acer Labs Aladin IV+ TX PRO if that's what you mean. I don't know a south bridge from a London bridge or a dental bridge, myself.
M5229 is the integrated UDMA IDE controller. The south bridge chip must be M1543. UDMA was tested on M5229 in M1541 (Aladdin V) and M1621 (Aladdin Pro II) but not in M1543 (Aladdin IV+).
One curious thing I noted in UDMA.ASM -- which might be perfectly valid because I know nothing about disk DMA -- is that in the DoIO routine, UDMA loads 'ah' with the BIOS timer value and then uses it as a timeout comparison on several 'in''s and 'out''s following. However, it seems to me (and as I say I could be wrong), that the timeout should be reset after each 'in' instruction or subblock, instead of cascading down through all the DoIO in's and out's with the same value. Or does timeout properly apply to the whole block of in's and out's in DoIO overall?
The whole DoIO must execute in much mess than 384 ms, so I think that this doesn't matter.
Is it true that the 384msec worst case timeout value is based on a spec or testing, and simply increasing the timeout value won't help get rid of any DMA timed out errors? That would be too easy.
I don't know how Jack chose that value. I know only that he ripped off a bad and buggy VIA driver before writing his own. Anyway, it's much higher than the real DoIO execution time.
Every programmer I know personally is closer in age to 58 than 21, so it's a phenomenon that will be more common in the coming years, I imagine.
It's good to have so experienced programmers contribute to FreeDOS. One thing could prevent them from doing so though - the possibility of being "flamed off" in our forums. Not everyone can withstand the ingratitude, disrespect and quarrelsomeness that SOMETIMES pour from them :-( This is the spoon of tar that can ruin the barrel of honey :-/ I can't generalise, but this was the exact reason why Jack never participated here and I had to be his "front man", with my supposedly "thick skin" (which is quite thin in fact too :)
Lucho
------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
