Ah, that's good news.

I do remember reading that some models of that board do have issues with 8MB modules, so watch out for that.

I might have a spare AMD X5 somewhere, I would sell it, but people here like to melt them down so that puts me off. I have heard CPUs are hard to find in Romania, so I could probably send it your way if you wanted? I'd rather just give it away free provided I know it will be used. It wouldn't be recognized by the board and will only be detected as a DX4 - but you should be able to "Overclock" to 120MHz or 150MHz without having to worry about it (It's an ADW version rated for 133MHz, but I have run it stably at 150MHz).

The current DX4 should be OK at 120MHz, but that doesn't come with guarantees I guess.

QBiN wrote:

Thanks. No, I get that. My question was more to NJroadfan... There's no way to "boot" a normal DOS floppy and run the flashing utility if the machine itself can't POST. No POST, no booting a DOS floppy regardless of what's on it.

Recovery mode seems to be the only path forward.

The board jumpered in Recovery Mode is what I was referring to when "flashing blind". Newer boards look for a specific file on a disk or USB storage device, these older boards are fairly dumb however and need a full DOS boot disk with the flasher auto running.

HighTreason wrote:

Ah, that's good news.

I do remember reading that some models of that board do have issues with 8MB modules, so watch out for that.

I might have a spare AMD X5 somewhere, I would sell it, but people here like to melt them down so that puts me off.

Me too - it makes me sad and angry that someone would destroy a perfectly good CPU for a few milligrams of gold.

HighTreason wrote:

I have heard CPUs are hard to find in Romania,

Not really... it's just that pentium chips way outsold 586 PCs, and in 486 times, only businesses had computers so those are also pretty scarce. You can get AT socket 7 boards and Pentium CPUs allmost for free here. Throughout 1991 - 1995 the PC was a thing of awe and mystery back here - barely anyone ever heard of it let alone own one. Things changed rapidly between 1996-2002 - the internet and games were being advertised mostly by telecom companies marketing a new service. Some early adopters and people on a budget bought 586 or 686 CPUs - but most bought a pentium - most common CPU's are 90, 100 and 120MHz P54C's.
I was lucky enough to get a brand new 586 when I was in 4th grade - it was a computer my dad was supposed to use for work - but since he had no idea what to do with it, he brought it home and let me have a go. I still remember it like it was yesterday - Beige case with an oval LCD dispay reading 133mhz - Logic brand 14" SVGA monitor, AT keyboard, COM mouse with three buttons and no scroll, and an OKI Microline printer. Built buy a romanian IT company called REL Computer - REL logo on the case and keyboard. They've since went under. The configuration was Cyrix 586 @ 133MHz, FIC 486-VIP-IO2, 8MB of FPM ram and an 800MB Quantum Fireball HDD. That's it. No sound card, no CD-ROM. I remember after I got it, I made it a habit to carry around a few formatted floppies, in case I found a game I liked. First game I got running on it is Volfield, then Dune 2. In 96 I got it an ISA sound card - yamaha chipset - plus 24 mb more ram, in 97 I got it a CD-ROM drive and aditional 2GB WD Caviar HDD, and finally in 97-98 a voodoo. I kept the computer up to 2000, when I upgraded to a K6-2 450 with a shitty MVP4 chipset and no AGP slot (Couldn't afford an MVP3 + dedicated video card). It's fine I said, now I can finally use my Voodoo2 to it's full potential - how fast can video cards possibly get 😜 - to my surprise, the built in Trident Blade 3D was allmost as fast as the voodoo 2... I still have my creative Voodoo 2 12mb, but it's kind of pointless in a 486 / 586 system...

I got the 486-VIP-IO because it's very similar to the VIP-IO2 I had (only that board had support for 586 processors). I've been trying to put together something similar - I managed to find the same exact case, sans the REL sticker - same exact AT mecanical keyboard - but I'm having a tough time finding the VIP-IO2 (or any board that supports a 586 CPU) and I can't find 72 pin FPM ram. Where ever I look - everyone has EDO 🙁

I have almost zero hope of finding a 16kb Cyrix 586 like the one I used to own - not only were 586's rare, 90% of them were AMD chips. I loved it! Oveclocked to 40MHz FSB it would go head to head with my friend's pentium 90 - that pissed him off so much 😁

HighTreason wrote:

so I could probably send it your way if you wanted? I'd rather just give it away free provided I know it will be used. It wouldn't be recognized by the board and will only be detected as a DX4 - but you should be able to "Overclock" to 120MHz or 150MHz without having to worry about it (It's an ADW version rated for 133MHz, but I have run it stably at 150MHz).

The current DX4 should be OK at 120MHz, but that doesn't come with guarantees I guess.

I'd love that 586 CPU - even some FPM ram if you have any lying around - I'm willing to pay for it of course - or trade you something from my meager collection (although judging from your youtube videos I don't think there's anything I could give you that you don't all-ready have).

NJRoadfan wrote:

QBiN wrote:

Thanks. No, I get that. My question was more to NJroadfan... There's no way to "boot" a normal DOS floppy and run the flashing utility if the machine itself can't POST. No POST, no booting a DOS floppy regardless of what's on it.

Recovery mode seems to be the only path forward.

The board jumpered in Recovery Mode is what I was referring to when "flashing blind". Newer boards look for a specific file on a disk or USB storage device, these older boards are fairly dumb however and need a full DOS boot disk with the flasher auto running.

On-topic - fought the batman some more today - it does work with a full DOS boot disk, but the bios version it installed makes the board hang in POST. At least now it posts 😀 - probably wrong bios version.

The thing is a friend came over with some interesting hardware I couldn't resist - three old half scavenged AT systems, two of them Pentium 1, and one K6 450 (that makes my third one) - but this one has an ALi chipset AT board. All my Super Seven boards happen to be Lucky Tech P5MVP3 - I have four of the things! Good boards thought. One of the systems had a nice Intel chipset socket 7 board, complete with a PS/2 mouse header, normal CMOS battery (none of that built in crap), USB, 4xSIMM slots and 2xDIMM slots - everything I need for the perfect P1 dosbox! (and I almost gave up and was planning on using an Intel built ATX socket 7 board) The system had a P1 MMX 233MHz (the one with the attached intel cooler - an I didn't have one in my collection!), a Cirrus Logic PCI card, and a Creative AWE64 (CT 4500)! Spent the better part of the day testing the ALi board (I like the MVP3 better - it can carry one of my K6 450's to 550MHz stable - the ALi board barely even pushes 500). My Voodoo 3 TV 3500 seems to like the ALi board better - either that or the ALi chipset has better AGP. The AWE64 gave me severe headaches - stock windows drivers would freeze upon loading - had to remove them and install the drivers from the creative site. Just when I thought I sorted it out, NO MIDI or AWE32 support in DOS! Spent 2 hours researching the problem, downloading drivers (crappy AWE64 DOS drivers won't install if they detect windows 95 or later) - and two more hours manually configuring Autoexec and Config files (well only autoexec was needed as it turns out) to get it working. Got it running finally - so tomorrow I fight the batman again.

Indeed, I have an X5 as I thought. I may have some spare RAM and it's not too hard to obtain where I am if I ever need more in the future so I'll have a look. I will probably only have 16MB to spare though. I'll get in touch via PM in the next few days then, I don't think it will cost much to post over to be honest, just cover the price of shipping and it's good enough. Do you have a heatsink? Because if not, I can probably provide one, but I may have to glue it on.

Looks like you guys over there skipped the generation we bought into, here we had a moderate number of 486s and no early Pentiums, but there is an abundance of 1997-1999 Pentium MMX systems which were most people's first systems. My family had an early Pentium though, until the hard drive died. It was Atlantic branded (Was from Makro, think it was their own branding) and was in an identical case to Hooker (My 486SX) except it had a blue power switch and a turbo button, Hooker's case is from the P166MMX which replaced it and I still have those parts, the case also has a label noting the original configuration.

I've dragged out my own 486-VIP-IO, going to try and make it work with the AMD 5x86 at 133MHz, it may be possible if the motherboard is told a few lies via the jumpers.

As for the Batman, mockingbird might be right about BIOS version, you can delete the files ending with AF2 on the floppy and just copy the files in from the AF1 zip linked earlier in the thread. But first, if you can get into the BIOS settings, Load Setup Defaults and then make sure Plug and Play and Extended CHS/Logical Block/Automatic disks are not enabled, only non-PNP and Standard CHS settings pass post for me on that board, I don't know why, it always did that.

OK, on BIOS 426 the FIC will run the 5x86 at its rated speed (Reports 132MHz) if the CPU is set to a P24D or DX4 with a 2x multiplier... But I still cannot enable write-back cache because changing JC7 stops the board from entering POST. There is also a significant performance drop and updating to BIOS 427 actually makes it worse and prevents the CPU reaching it's target speed (Though reports 150MHz?), both score significantly lower than even a DX2-66 for some reason. I'll keep playing with it for now though.

I have no spare RAM unfortunately, the only sticks I can find spare are faulty so I think my POD is using the last of the good memory I had.

I will still send the CPU if you want it though as I am never going to use it and you might find a board which supports it at some stage.

Sure, I'd love the CPU. It's interesting that the DX5 runs on the FIC @ 133Mhz - it turns a 2x multi in 4x - like some K6 CPUs turn 3.5x to 5.5x or 2x to 6x 😀 - cool. I have no issues with my FIC and write back cache. Curiously enough, I have my DX4 set to write back, and the board post just fine. Performance is still sh|t thought, so I guess it works in write-trough mode, despite the settings made trough JP7 and BIOS - 45 pts in speedsys @ 120MHz, and 57 @ 150MHz. Not very stable at 150 in windows either (then again I'm using stock voltage).

I can't update to 427 - my mb doesn't have a programmable EEPROM. I thought of using a bios chip from one of my other boards - by setting the FIC's bios chip voltage to 5V and hot flashing - but now I'm convinced I shouldn't.

No worries about the ram. I'll find some sooner or later. A friend of mine is bringing over two 4MB simms - plus the 8mb and 4mb I have installed right now, the system should run fine for what I play on it.

Batman is acting really weird - I made the settings you suggested, got it to post and installed DOS 6.22. Seems to work OK. Scores 54 in speedsys cpu test - don't know what I was expecting 😁. I'm using a Tseng 4000 ISA VGA card, 32MB of EDO (2x16MB in bank 0), a CT 2600 and an adaptec PCI SCSI controller. The on board IDE is wierd - I installed DOS just fine, but I'm having issues getting win95 to install. It kept saying there is a problem with drive C. Finally, i was able to install windows on a 36Gb SCSI drive (Witch I hate because it sounds like and angle grinder having intimate relations with a piece of copper) - but it's the smallest working SCSI drive I own, but the whole sistem is acting funny. Sound is sometimes garbled or delayed, and I get random sporadic 2D artefacts - the GPU is known to be good. Tomorrow I'll try to install a PCI VGA card - see what that does.

Oh, before I installed the PCI SCSI controller, I an ISA one - same issue as with the built-in IDE controller.

Looks like an IDE RZ1000 Bug:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010609190128/htt … z1000/index.htm

kanecvr wrote:

Thanks a million guys. Meantime, here's some pics of he board:

Looks like Batman's Revenge (AF2) to me...