Intel Advanced/EV -> Advanced/ZP

[EluanCM]

PCem supports the Advanced/EV (Endeavor) intel motherboard, but the BIOS doesn't have CD-ROM boot capability. The Advanced/ZP (Zappa) motherboard is nearly identical, except for not having optional onboard audio/video which PCem doesn't emulate anyway. The ICs, memory map, etc, are all equal.

After replacing the Endeavor BIOS with the Zappa one, CD-ROM booting (BIOS supports only in "First Boot Device") and almost everything works perfectly, except for a "System Board Device Resource Conflict" on boot. According to the manual, this is a resource conflict with the onboard devices. Reseting the nvram and loading BIOS defaults makes no difference and the CMOS setup auto-configures both serial ports to COM4 and disables the IDE bus mastering controller. Manual settings have no effect.

The Windows 95 device manager shows no conflicts and everything works as it should, except for the setup glitch and having to press ESC to continue booting after the error.

Anyone has any insights into what can be done? The boards were supposed to be identical, but something seems to be wired differently under the hood. Is CD-ROM booting enough of a tradeoff to switch from one board to the other in PCem? The extra devices in Endeavor aren't emulated anyway.

[ecksemmess]

This is an interesting observation, and should probably be looked into. All I would add is that, if the Advanced/ZP is added (which probably is worth doing), the Advanced/EV needs to be retained as well, as many of us have made extensive use of it in our configurations. I have an absolutely massive folder full of Advanced/EV configurations for PCem, and it would be a nightmare to have to go through and try to figure out whether the shift to the Advanced/ZP might have broken anything on any of them, which is always a possibility. I do think it's probably worthwhile having both boards available, though.

[EluanCM]

It turns out it also happens with the Endeavor, but the BIOS simply doesn't strictly check the configuration.

I know that PCem mostly ignores Super IO settings in some emulated systems. In this case, a UM8669F Super IO device is emulated while both the Endeavor and Zappa use the National Semiconductor PC87306. This causes the relevant BIOS settings to not work. This is okay, but unfortunately the Zappa BIOS sets the configuration and then checks it, resulting in the non-fatal error. According to the NS PC87306 datasheet, the configuration is rather simple and the UM8669F implementation serves as a guide. I wish I had time to implement it.

[ecksemmess]

IIRC, Battler has already written up an implementation of the NS PC87306, as well as a number of other Super I/O chips. He was focusing pretty heavily on those for a while. Unless there are some unresolved issues that he knows about, it should be easy enough for him to submit them to Sarah and get them into mainline. So, hopefully, you'll get your wish before too long.

[Battler]

I did implement that, yeah, but I'm not yet sure how well it works, hence why I haven't committed it yet.

[EluanCM]

You have saved me a weekend of coding, thank you!

What still needs testing? Everything?