From: "John K. Picken" To: Subject: SIO2PC and SpartaDOS Date: Sunday, April 09, 2000 7:00 PM After many months of procrastination I finally got my A8 up and running again (even managed to fix the MIO). After that, the first priority was to get SIO2PC working with it as I have no intention of trying to find SCSI drives with 256-byte sectors--the MIO will serve only as a RAMdisk and (infrequently) printer interface unless I get really interested and revive my old project to write a software driver to use 512-byte sectors (my thoughts were that the thing could be accomplished by combining it with a cache using a bit of MIO RAM and that some of the driver code could also be stashed in MIO RAM). Anyway, in setting up SIO2PC, the first thing I noticed was that the high speed SIO would not work with SpartaDOS--but it used to damn it!. After a little head scratching and a lot of verbal obscenity I finally remembered how I'd done it in the past--it's in the timing menu. The first time I used SIO2PC I think it was version 3.10 and Nick Kennedy was, at that time, using different timing values than the ones built into 3.19 and 4.19. That version always gave me high speed i/o with Sparta, and later I'd used the same values successfully with 3.19. Fortunately I'd kept the settings on a scrap of paper so I set up 4.19 as follows: DEFAULT CURRENT T1: Time before 1st ACK 0300 0064 T2: Time before 2nd ACK * 0FA0 04B0 T3: Time before COMPLETE * 0300 012C T4: Time before COMPLETE ** 0300 012C T5: Time after COMPLETE ** 0300 01F4 T6: Time between data bytes ** 0000 0000 T7: Time between UART accesses 0008 0000 T8: Time between printer records 0000 0000 These settings gave me high speed SIO with Sparta versions 3.2d, 3.2g, and 3.3b using first an 8mhz 8088 and later a 25mhz 386SX. Now that my slave PC has graduated to a 486DX-33, they work with it and Sparta 3.3b (not tested with other Sparta versions). In all cases the PC UARTs were 16450's. So, if you can't get high speed SIO to work with SIO2PC, try fiddling with the timings; the settings above, which I think are Nick's old defaults, will give you a jumping-off point. Once you find some that work, you can modify SIO2PC using the Debug technique Nick describes in his docs. BTW the version of 3.3b that I'm using has been slightly modified so that it doesn't relocate buffers to low RAM when a MIO or other parallel device is detected and the sign-on message includes a warning not to use BASICXE extensions (also fixed the spelling in other messages :). If you'd like a copy, let me know. jkp