Date, Floppy disks, Expansion Socket | SMC Networks 1232 Series

Date

The date is displayed in standard format: MMM DD YYYY (month - day - year); all the three fields contain numerical values only.

Floppy disks 1..4

Each system incorporates a controller capable of driving up to four floppy disks, according to the hardware mounted on-board. The floppy disks are numbered starting from one and the BIOS maps these drivers starting form the letter “A”.

Note: during the floppy disk assignment it is a good practice filling the devices consecutively, without any “hole” from one device to another.

Note: when the boot sequence starts from floppy disk number one (DOS letter “A”), any device selected as floppy disk 1 can be a bootable disk. Obviously this device must represent a real bootable disk, with a proper boot sector and containing a valid O.S.

Note: In the SpacePC 1232 only one external FDD can be connected.

All the floppy disks can be configured with the same options:

Option		Description	Note
None	No floppy disk selected
360 KB	Floppy disk 5	¼ - size 360 Kbytes
1.2 MB	Floppy disk 5	¼ - size 1.2 Mbytes
720 KB	Floppy disk 3	½ - size 720 Kbytes
1.44 MB	Floppy disk 3	½ - size 1.44 Mbytes	Common used size
Integrated SSD	On-board Flash EEPROM		Always available on all boards

The following one is the default configuration (as shown in the previous picture): Floppy Disk 1: Integrated SSD

Floppy Disk 2: None

Floppy Disk 3: None

Floppy Disk 4: None

Note: with the previous default configuration, the Integrated SSD (that is a READ ONLY MEMORY) is seen with the DOS letter “A”, and the system bootstraps from it. If you want to use also a real Floppy Disk, you must set it as Floppy Disk 2. It will be seen with the DOS letter “B”.

Note: the floppy controller use the same connector used by the parallel port. In this case when the floppy controller is enabled, the parallel port is automatically disabled, even if it was already enabled in the Setup. The parallel port can be used again after disabling the floppy disk controller.

Expansion Socket

The Expansion Socket is available to mount different type of solid-statememory devices. If you want to use a PEROM or a SRAM, you must also configure a “Floppy Disk 1..4” as Expansion Socket. Anyway a Disk On Chip (DOC) is always seen as a hard disk, and it doesn’t need a further setting in the “Floppy Disk 1..4” section. If the assigned floppy is FD1 and the boot try sequence is FD1/HD1, the system starts bootstrapping from the memory mounted on the expansion socket.