[LONG POST]!

Ray Davison wrote:

>I pulled out a ECS K7VTA3, Athlon 2200, and put in a ECS 755-A2,
>
do either of those have APM 1.2 support?

> Athlon 64 3000.
>  
>
*Very* nice, making me envious!

>DRDOS seems to have no change at all.  All hardware is recognized; 
>mouse, all FAT16 and 32 drives.
>
>Win98SE was it's usual nuisance, but everything seems to work.
>
>OS/2.  I removed of APM.SYS and TESTCFG.SYS.  The new MB, under OS/2, 
>likes my DVD burner even less than the old one did.  I went back to 
>the CD burner.  OS/2 will now boot using DANIS605 version 1.70.
>
>I seem to have no input to the DT.  No mouse and ctrl and cursor keys 
>do nothing.
>
>Ideas?
>
>Ray
>  
>

Hi Ray,
I don't know whether the appended posting on XOSL group might have 
something to do with it.

>All,
>
>after some further investigations, I have SOLVED this issue (at least
for my Toshiba Tecra S1 BIOS)!
>
>Also, it is quite likely that the solution that I found will also work
for other keyboard-related problems, e.g. keyboard not responding from the
DOS command line after having left XOSL.
>
>The root cause for the problem is infamous the "A20 gate"
used for access to "extended memory" which used to be switched on
and off using calls to the keyboard controller, some kind of horrible PC
legacy from the early days. (I have never written PC assembler code myself
before, but found a truly interesting compilation of several
"A20" issues can be found at
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/A20.html.)
>
>It looks like the code to handle the A20 gate included with XOSL 1.15
xosl\misc\a20line.asm (marked to be "taken from Ranish Partition
Manager 2.38 Beta 1.9") does not work any more for recent BIOS
versions, in particular notebook BIOSes.
>
>I have moved to using new BIOS INT15h AX=240x calls for implementing
A20 switching, as can be seen from the attached modified a20line.asm, and
using this new version in fact fixes all keyboard issues for me! :-)))
>
>Besides the changed source file, I've also attached a ZIP file which
contains the compiled Xoslimg*.xxf files, so in the binary install of plain
XOSL 1.15, simply replace the old versions by the new versions from the ZIP
file.
>
>Please be aware that in order for the modified version to work, the
BIOS must implement the "new" BIOS INT 15h AX=240x calls for
implementing A20 switching (should be the case for most recent BIOSes,
anyway), as I have not included any error handling in case the BIOS does
not support the new calls.
>
>Best regards from Germany,
>
>Andreas
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: Andreas Loew
>To: xosl{at}yahoogroups.com
>Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 2:44 PM
>Subject: [xosl] Toshiba Tecra S1: Keyboard dead within XOSL GUI
>
>All,
>
>I would like to run XOSL (Version 1.15) on my new Toshiba Tecra S1
(latest BIOS revision 2.30) in order to boot WinXP, Debian Linux and
Solaris 9 x86.
>
>Unfortunately, I have found the keyboard to be completely dead from
within XOSL, although it generally works fine outside of XOSL. Also, XOSL
itself used to run fine on my previous Dell Latitude Notebook (using the
same HDD partition config).
>
>I have also tried the two laptop workarounds available at
>http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xosl/files/other_binaries/, but without
any luck (they seem to address different types of problems, anyway).
>
>So my question now is: Are there any known issues with accessing the
keyboard from othernotebooks as well?
>>From looking at the source code, to me (I'm no assembler freak at
all), it seems that XOSL is only using fairly standard calls to INT 16H
(see XOSL\Keyboard\key.asm).
>
>Are there any known issues about Toshiba/Tecra S1 BIOSes? Is it
possible that there is any special init sequence/keyboard reset needed on
the S1 before accessing the keyboard using INT 16H will work?
>
>Unfortunately, I have found Toshiba support in Germany to be quite
>uncooperative and unwilling to resolve my problem (general answer is:
>"Sorry, but you are using unsupported software"), although my
problem is probably about the BIOS and not about XOSL itself, but would
still care a great deal to get my issue resolved.
>
>Many thanks in advance & best regards from Germany,
>
>Andreas
>    
>
-- 

Regards,
Mike

Failed the exam for
--------------------
MCSE - Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert
--------------------
[ISP blocks *.exe, *.cmd, *.bat, *.reg attachments]
[Please use zipped versions of above]



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