I had a really hard time trying to figure out how to make XT-CF-Lite work on this 5150 with MFM drive. With the MFM controller card removed CF card was booting ok, bet when the MFM card was installed – it was booting straight to the hard drive ( I am so surprised this hard drive still works, but I will make a separate topic for it ). And I wanted an option to select a CF card or hard drive.
Lots of googling did not provide me with the needed ROM for my XT-CF-Lite so I have decided to build BIOS myself. www.xtideuniversalbios.org seems to be down or inaccessible somehow, but I have found old bios https://code.google.com/archive/p/xtideuniversalbios/
I have managed to configure and build it but unfortunately, it did not work on XT-CF-Lite. Then I have looked at the XT-CF-Lite site I found that bios source was provided there. But that could not be compiled. So what I did I have merged sources from xtideuniversalbios v2.0.0_beta_3 with XT-CF-Lite provided source ( basically I copied XT-CF-Lite source on top on xtideuniversalbios v2.0.0_beta_3 ) and then it started compiling.
Next, I had to find the correct settings. I have compiled with XT option and it worked and booted to HDD but the menu was not available. So I have added MODULE_BOOT_MENU but then compiled bios was too large for my 28c64 that can fit only 8192 bytes.
So I had to remove something from the XT configuration to fit in the menu option. At the end this configuration worked out:
DEFINES_COMMON = MODULE_STRINGS_COMPRESSED MODULE_HOTKEYS MODULE_8BIT_IDE
DEFINES_XT = $(DEFINES_COMMON) MODULE_8BIT_IDE_ADVANCED COPY_13H_HANDLER_TO_40H MODULE_BOOT_MENUWith this built version I could finally have a menu and select which drive I want to boot.
You can find my built version of XT-CF-Lite bios with boot menu enabled here
https://github.com/voidsky/xtideuniversalbios/tree/main/xtcf/XTIDE_Universal_BIOS/Build
UPDATE
Or maybe I could just set the default boot drive to 81 in the bios configurator and spare myself from all those troubles in building bios? Will have to test it.
Leave a Reply