On the 16/7/96  09:40, Bob waffled to Dieter..

 Hello Bob,  
 
 DM> EMFBI, just to warn you - the serial and parallel cables that
 DM> come from the ISA card to the actual physical DBx connection
 DM> are not all the same - use the one that comes supplied with
 DM> your card.
 
 DM> Spent a wee while chasing that one down.

 BL> Yair... I know. The cable the nice Chinese gave me with the VESA
 BL> card does not match it. I went 90% crazy tracking it down; finally
 BL> isolating it to the cable and checking it wire-by-wire until Brenton
 BL> says: "There are two types, A and B, and no one knows which is
which."
 BL> ROFL!

 Actually, come to think of it, it was a new VESA board, and a
 RS232 cable from a ISA card, that caused the problems. So maybe
 there are VESA serial cables, and ISA serial cables.

 BL> IFIIKE (I'm fucked if I know, either). WTF does EMFBI mean?

 Erections Must Firmly Be Implanted.
 
 BL> Anyway, I got the bloody thing working. In the end I gave up trying
 BL> to find the bad connection in the IDE pin header and resoldered the
 BL> lot; I bunged in a coupla XOR gates (HC logic; the 4000 series is too
 BL> slow), superglued on an IRQ11 copper track, and everything works! I
 BL> have a max of four hard drives on the VESA card running Mode-4, plus
 BL> the floppy, LPT1, games port, and mouse (I disabled the funny cable)
 BL> and on the modified ISA card I run the CD ROM on address 1E8/IRQ11,
 BL> plus LPT2 and COM3/4. I've got sockets everywhere!

 Great fun, eh !!

 Had something similar, but wasn't so drastic - just a simple
 matter of substituting a wire to re-route IRQ5 to the IRQ7
 jumpers for a parallel printer connection, so I could have two
 parallel printers.

 BL> It only took me 20 hours. On my normal consulting rate I could have
 BL> bought a new Pentium complete. The next one I modify will be easier...
 BL> I'll just buy a sound card for $60.

 Or Plug-n-Pray....

 Dieter
 

... Why experiment on animals with so many Windows users out there?
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
@EOT:

---