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@6263.ADF - Arco AC-1070 IDE Controller @62B6.ADF - Arco AC-1079 SLIM Drive Adapter Allows Mirroring! ARCO.zip DOS/Win 3.x, NT3.5,OS2,Novell 286/386, adf, MCAIDE The 1070 is the early one piece card version, unlike the 1075, which has a detachable slot bracket. The 1075 will fit in the Integrated Drive controller slot on a 50/50z if you remove the single phillips screw in the upper right corner of the adapter. ARCO in an 8550
AC-1075 Rev C 
Peter said
The main disadvantage on that controller is the off-standard I/O adress. It will not be detected properly as IDE controller under e.g. Windows or with any OEM IDE driver under DOS. As far as I can tell from tracking the connections two of the PALs are used to set the card-ID / POS and the other two are address decoders for the I/O range and the other decodes the ROM adress. Card-ID detection could be easily done with 2 x 8-bit logic comparators
... but you really don't need to do that if you'd opt for a "passive" card
that just occupies a fixed I/O range and directly hooks to IRQ 14h. That
card would be treated as a system board extension - just like a COM- or
LPT-port. The only thing you need is a boot ROM that hooks into the PS/2
ABIOS routine
It couldn't be that complicated. The most of the routines are already included within the IBM ABIOS. The complete handbook scans of the PS/2 BIOS are in the PDF download section on my pages. Guess I need to copy the ROM content from the CMS / ARCO controller
into my Eprommer and dig a bit in it on how they did it. That controller
is bootable and there must be an easy mechanism on how they hook the drive
into the bootable devices list.
AC-1075 Rev D 
Note the much reduced chip count.
ARCO in a 8550 From Peter Some versions of the Arco IDE had been designed to substitute the "HD Riser" card in the hidden 4th slot on the Mod. 50. You just remove the blue tab at the card front and remove the rear slotcover - and the card should fit in there. IDE in an IML Machine?
System Partition on IDE?
Start Up Sequence
AC-1075 with IBM SCSI Adapters under W95
W95 and the AC-1070
More to come. I must get my 9590 back up to install W95 on an IDE drive.... BIOS Capabilities
CD Rom Drives on ARCO 1070 William Walsh was cracking the whip down at Farmwagon.com, and came up with: NOTE: The wildman did not have the ARCO CD Rom drivers! Ddecided to try my ATAPI CD-ROMs with the Arco 1070 controller. According to the startup screen, the controller has ROM Version 3.05. I was doing this in a Model 50Z PS/2. I also tried all of this in a 9577 Bermuda, an 8557slc, and a Model 8570-E61. The first thing I learned from trying this is that there must be a hard disk attached to the adapter as well. I couldn't seem to get it to find any of my CD-ROM drives without a hard disk attached. The ADF and Set Configuration screens kind of hint at this...you are allowed to pick a type of IDE device for the slave device only. There is no similar option for the master device. Next thing I learned is that you have to use an external power supply for any CD-ROM drive above 6X with your Model 50. (The 70 PSU seemed to handle things OK.) The 50Z PSU simply couldn't stand the 8X and higher drives, even with no other adapters in the machine. I sort of expected this, seeing as it is a small supply. The Arco adapter also seems to be picky about what kind of CD-ROM drives it will accept. I had no problems with all of my 4X or 6X drives (all NEC units, and one Torisan), and of the one 24X drive (Toshiba) I tried, it was found by the adapter as well. I did not have the same luck with any of my 8X Hitachi drives. Those drives (8X Hitachi) resulted in system lockups and hard disk (10xxx) errors during POST. Anyway, once I had a CD-ROM drive installed and recognized by the adapter, I tried loading DOS device drivers for the CD-ROM drive. The first driver I tried (a seemingly universal one) just locked the machine whenever it loaded. No text, no errors, nothing at all. Just a lockup. I tried other drives with that, and when I was finally satisfied that it was not the drives, I tried another universal IDE CD-ROM device driver. It loaded, but found no drives, no matter what. It seems that the unusual I/O addresses of the Arco adapter throw the CD-ROM device drivers that I tried for a loop. Summary: In theory, it seems that BIOS revision 3.05 of the Arco card
will support certain CD-ROM drives, but that the device drivers I tried
to use to make these CD-ROM drives work either locked the computer or could
find no CD-ROM drives.
PIO Mode Only? NOTE: From the Luser's manual: "... the ARCO BIOS allows the AC-1070/75 to run at I/O addresses 2510h or 2520h as well as respond to interrupt 14". >The .ADF for the Arco makes NO reference to the IRQ used (if any). Now this could mean that it's hard-wired to IRQ14 (as is the onboard ESDI), or that it is I/O polled. From Peter
Max Drive Size The ARCO may not see the 2.5(doubtful) It does have an EIDE limit of 2.1GB accordingly and also supports internal EIDE CD-Roms (for 5.25" bay units). But it has its own Drive table settings on the card. Most likely when you preformatted the drive on a different computer the Cyls/Hds/S-T are different than what the BIOS on the card is going to see The AC-1070 controller's adapter BIOS supports IDE drives up to 2 Gb. If a drive was partitioned and formatted to a higher capacity, the controller will not permit the drive to operate under that partitioning scheme. My question- will it allow multiple 2.1 GB partitions?
ATAPI CDROM Support The @6263.adf, dated 07/02/95 has a section for CD Rom support. MCIDE.EXE
IDE and SCSI From Tim Clarke Before this gets too out of hand - the rules for mixing an IDE/ESDI adapter with SCSI adapter(s) *for the Model 80* (and probably all others) are as follows: 1) you may only install one IDE or ESDI adapter 2) IDE/ESDI adapter's BIOS ROM *must* be configured with a lower address than that of the SCSI adapter(s) This is because the IDE/ESDI BIOS ROM code isn't intelligent
enough to "add" the drives that it supports after any drives which may
have already been installed by another BIOS ROM (e.g. multiple SCSI adapters
with multiple HDs each). It assumes that the drive(s) that it supports
will always be Drive 0 (BIOS Drive 0x80) and Drive 1 (BIOS Drive 0x81).
The IBM SCSI adapters' BIOS ROM is designed to "add" it's drives to a system
which already has one or more HDs already "installed" and utilises the
XBDA (eXtended BIOS Data Area) to chain Int 13h, Int 4Bh (IBM SCSI) and
note "first" and "count" values for each SCSI adapter.
Supposed Specs Transfer rates in excess of 1200Kbps On board BIOS for intelligent interface Automatic Drive Recognition (ADR) recognizes / supports all IDE drives AdapterID 6263 Arco Computer Products, Inc (IDE Adatpter) Adapter Memory Location
IO Address
Slave Drive is
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