IZBIOS Configuration Panel Guide

A per-screen walkthrough of the Del setup panel, the Izarra-BIOS's graphical configuration tool. For the quick tour, see the user manual; this page goes one screen deeper.

Press Del during POST to open it. The panel draws on the same Margo linear frame buffer mode the POST screen uses, so it shares its palette: cream field, near-black text, red titles. Everything you change here is a working copy: nothing reaches CMOS until you choose Save and Exit.

Seven rows, moved between with Up/Down. A two-line help string under the box updates to describe whichever row is highlighted.

Row	Key(s)	Help text shown
TIME	Enter	`Enter: set clock` / `Up/Dn move Esc back`
KEYBOARD	Left/Right/Enter	`Left/Right: change keyboard` / `Enter: open`
CPU MODE	Left/Right/Enter	`Left/Right: change CPU speed` / `Enter: open`
PERIPHERALS	Enter	`Enter: check devices` / `Up/Dn move Esc back`
REPAIR TOKA-DOS	Enter	`Enter: reinstall Toka-DOS` / `Up/Dn move`
SAVE AND EXIT	Enter or F10	`Enter/F10: save and reboot` / `Up/Dn move`
DISCARD AND EXIT	Enter or Esc	`Enter/Esc: discard and reboot` / `Up/Dn move`

KEYBOARD and CPU MODE are inline rows: their current value is drawn to the right of the label, and Left/Right (or Enter, which behaves like Right) cycles it in place without opening a sub-page. The other rows with a Enter action open a full sub-screen.

TIME

Title: SET TIME AND DATE. Hint: L/R field Up/Dn change Esc back.

Six fields in order: Hour, Minute, Second, Day, Month, Year. Left/Right moves between fields; Up/Down (or Enter) bumps the highlighted field up or down by one, wrapping at each field's limits. The clock is edited as a binary 24-hour value, matching the machine's real-time clock format. Editing any field marks the time as changed, so Save and Exit knows to write it to the RTC; if you never touch this screen, the clock is left alone.

KEYBOARD

Cycles through the machine's 17 selectable keyboard layouts (US, UK, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and more) directly on the main menu, with no sub-page. The chosen layout takes effect immediately for feedback, and is written to CMOS on Save, together with the matching boot code page for that layout's characters.

CPU MODE

Cycles the boot-time CPU speed directly on the main menu, in the order 386 → 486 → 586 → 286, wrapping back to 386. This sets the speed class the machine will boot at next time, saved to CMOS on Save. It's the same four classes and the same underlying value as the Tab boot menu, just reachable from inside setup instead. It does not change the machine's speed live; for that, either use the Tab boot menu at the next boot, or run GSWMODE from inside Toka-DOS (see the command reference).

PERIPHERALS

Title: PERIPHERAL CHECK. Hint: Esc: back to menu.

Re-runs seven of the POST hardware probes live and non-destructively, listing each with a PASS or FAIL status in a boxed table:

LOTURA      PIT TIMER    SB DSP     MARGO VGA
8042 KBD    COM1 UART    OPL FM

PASS is shown in sage green, FAIL in red. This is a diagnostic screen only. There is nothing here to configure, just a live re-check without a full reboot.

REPAIR TOKA-DOS

Reinstalls Toka-DOS's system files from the copy built into ROM. Selecting it fires a request to the emulated Lotura chipset's service port and waits for a status. On success it reports:

Toka-DOS repaired

See Repair Toka-DOS for exactly what this leaves alone versus what it replaces.

SAVE AND EXIT / DISCARD AND EXIT

Save and Exit commits the working copy: keyboard layout and CPU mode go to CMOS, the clock goes to the real-time clock if the Time screen was edited, a checksum is recomputed over the saved settings, and the machine reboots. Discard and Exit (or Esc from the main menu, which does the same thing) throws every change away and reboots with whatever was already saved.

What persists across reboots

Only two settings are written by this panel: the keyboard layout (CMOS offset 0x10) and the CPU mode (CMOS offset 0x12). The clock is written to the real-time clock hardware directly, not CMOS, when the Time screen was used. The Tab boot menu writes the CPU mode and the boot device order (CMOS offset 0x11) independently of this panel. The two entry points share the same underlying CMOS fields where they overlap. A stored checksum protects the saved block; if it doesn't match at boot, the BIOS falls back to defaults rather than trusting corrupted settings.