Mike's PCjr Page

My jrIDE is using the BIOS based off the v0.11 of XT-IDE Universal BIOS from 2012. Can it be upgraded to anything newer? I believe r604 is the current XT-IDE BIOS (dated 12-15-2021) and the module "MODULE_8BIT_IDE_ADVANCED" does have explicit jrIDE support. I'd like a BIOS that does not wait to search for a second hard drive, which just slows down boot time for me. Also, if the issue of the second boot menu when loading a memory manager like JRCONFIG.SYS has been fixed, that would also be useful.

There is a Universal BIOS for the XT-IDE that supposedly supports the jrIDE. You might want to look into it.

I'd like to update the BIOS to fix some problems and add features, but I don't have a lot of free time anymore. To me it's a miracle that the original BIOS worked, and has worked so well for nearly 10 years. Nobody has ever reported a data corruption bug due to the BIOS, and that pleases me greatly.

The double menu thing was fixed in the last version, I'm sure of it. I use jrconfig and I don't have that issue anymore.

I am curious if the generic XT-IDE BIOS works on the JrIDE, but I imagine you'd lose PCjr specific features like booting from cartridge.

Mike, would you have time to throw the code on github? It's time to open source it. The XT-IDE 0.11 source isn't current against whatever you've done for the PCjr, so I can't really help here.

It needs some deep cleaning first. I'll make the time to do that.

I'd be willing to try it and report back if I had a surefire way to revert back to v0.11 in case something went wrong.