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- Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc
- Path: sparky!uunet!uchinews!ellis!sip1
- From: sip1@ellis.uchicago.edu (Timothy F. Sipples)
- Subject: Re: AMI BIOS incompatibilities????!!!???
- Message-ID: <1992Jul22.161424.4129@midway.uchicago.edu>
- Sender: news@uchinews.uchicago.edu (News System)
- Reply-To: sip1@midway.uchicago.edu
- Organization: Dept. of Econ., Univ. of Chicago
- References: <1992Jul22.032138.25059@agora.uucp>
- Distribution: na
- Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 16:14:24 GMT
- Lines: 26
-
- In article <1992Jul22.032138.25059@agora.uucp> tedm@agora.rain.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) writes:
- >Just out of pure curiosity, why would a BIOS be a problem for OS2? After all,
- >BIOS code is written to be run in REAL mode. I thought OS2 runs in the
- >flat PROTECTED mode. Is the OS making BIOS calls for I/O & such? It would
- >seem to be a drag on the system speed.
-
- It would. And OS/2 really doesn't use the BIOS. The only exceptions
- I am aware of are use of peripheral card BIOSes (e.g. video card),
- especially for mode switching, and use of the hard drive BIOS if using
- the IBMINT13.I13 driver.
-
- The difficulty sometimes lies in the keyboard BIOS. Believe it or not
- your PC has a separate keyboard CPU (called the 8042) with its own
- memory/BIOS. This CPU is charged with handling keyboard input. Since
- OS/2 is not written for the 8042 (:-)), the code this CPU uses to run
- is on a BIOS chip. If the BIOS is poorly written even OS/2 can have
- some problems. Fortunately this problem does not seem to affect many
- people, but if you have keyboard problems, and you have an AMI
- keyboard BIOS earlier than revision F, you may need a $15 replacement
- chip. Read the file amiinfo.txt on ftp-os2.nmsu.edu for details.
-
- --
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