Technical data

Utility Software for MS-DOS
84 VIPA GmbH CP486 ⋅ 00/14
5.1 MS DOS Utilities for Silicon Disk Operation
5.1.1 Silicon Disk Driver
The BIOS contains driver functions for operating and usage of standard hardware components.
Additional or modified hardware has also to be operated by drivers. For fear that every small system
change requires to set up a new BIOS, MS-DOS offers the possibility to couple additional drivers to
the BIOS. This happens by means of an entry in the file CONFIG.SYS.
For the CP486 there are several silicon disks available:
- chip silicon disk (IC3, IC4):
The chip silicon disk has a capacity of 256KB resp. 1MB. The chip silicon disk can be
assembled with SRAM, EPROM and PEROM.
- memory card silicon disk
memory cards have a capacity of 128KB, 512KB and 1MB. There are OTP-ROM- and SRAM
memory cards available.
- silicon disk addtional board
The different additional boards have a capacity up to 7MB and are available with the
component parts FLASH-, SRAM- and EPROM.
In order to respond to the silicon disks as drives, the corresponding driver has to be entered in the
system configuration file CONFIG.SYS.
Several drivers are available:
SDRAM.SYS driver for SRAM silicon disk
The driver enables to read or write silicon disks.
SDROM.SYS driver for EPROM-, FLASH-PROM- and OTP-ROM silicon disks
This driver enables nothing but read.
SDPEROM.SYS driver for silicon disks with EEPROM modules
(This silicon disk can be read and written. However the durability of
EEPROMs depends strongly on the number of write cycles (1000 up to 10000
according to type). Therefore it is recommended to install this driver just short-
term to fill the EEPROMs with data, or modify data. Following the driver
SDROM.SYS should be used to prevent write accesses.