Mike's PCjr Page

I had a question about the jrIDE I recently installed.

I started with adding it to my system as it was configured (2 parallel port sidecards, 1 512kb sidecar, plus a PC Enterprises 5 1/4" HD drive powered up and connected to the parallel port). I noticed that I had issues getting it to recognize my CF to IDE adapter card. Long story short, I discovered that if the system had ANY cartridge in any slot, it would not recognize any IDE devices connected to the jrIDE. I even took it down to just 1 parallel port card and the jrIDE, same issue. I checked the BIOS and it has the latest BIOS on the jrIDE that from what I read is supposed to address an issue with the cartridges.

So recently I went with the jrATX power adapter card and a picoATX power supply and everything was happy. So I experimented and plugged my BASIC cartridge back in and lo and behold, the jrIDE worked just fine. I then proceeded to plug in a game cartridge and...same thing, it's happy and I can select my boot device and it works perfectly.

Is this a symptom that the system was marginal on power? Before the ATX P/S swap it had the larger PCjr power supply card inside which to my understanding was around 70 watts, at least when new? So it didn't have the 30ish watt power supply, which would never have powered all those sidecars anway.

Also, does anyone know of a IDE to CF card that takes power off pin 20? All the ones I see have that pin removed .

What BIOS do you have on it? I know of the (now outdated) one that I adapted from XT-IDE in 2012 - are there others floating around?

The original power cards are either 33 or 45 watts. I always used a power sidecar on my system before going to ATX but it would not surprise me if you were getting flaky operation on the 45 watt power supply with jrIDE and a parallel sidecar. (It should work, but you might have a marginal power supply card.)

(Alan did a nice internal power card; I'm using ATX on my main Jr because I'm also powering an external hard drive so I need a bench power supply anyway.)

Brutman wrote: ↑Fri Oct 08, 2021 4:40 pm What BIOS do you have on it? I know of the (now outdated) one that I adapted from XT-IDE in 2012 - are there others floating around?

It's running 2021-11-12 (says based on XT-IDE BIOS v0.11). I remember reading in the forums about fixing an issue like this and though "oh, it's just got an older BIOS on it", but this is the latest to my understanding.

You either have a time traveler there or a typo .. I'm going with a typo, which makes that the 2012 BIOS that I shipped.

My memory isn't what it used to be but there there were never any problems recognizing the jrIDE with a cartridge installed. During development I used the BASIC cartridge as a "chicken switch" to disable the jrIDE BIOS in case I did something tragically bad, but there were no issues like that ever reported.

That BIOS could use some updates to add new features, but the most important thing is that it works correctly and doesn't corrupt data.

Yeah, sorry, that was most certainly a typo!

I suspect it may be the old power supply becoming marginal. It was occasionally having weird intermittent errors that would start going away if the computer were left on a few minutes and restarted. I should know more once I've had more time with the new power supply to see if any of the old behaviors return or not.