Oh yeah, I almost forgot, here's the modified BIOS, which might be helpful for anyone else with an MV035F that doesn't let them change any CMOS Setup options.

Sorry to bump this, but I just added some cache sockets and installed 128KB of L2 cache into them (20ns chips, 12ns TAG chip). I could have added all nine sockets to get 256KB, but I had an 8KB chip and four 'odd' brand 32K chips I wanted to use up, so I just installed five for now.
The tangible effect on performance was much smaller than I had anticipated, probably because the board was already pretty flipping quick without it. Adding L2 cache did reduce the sub-128KB off-L1 move speed hit under Speedsys by a whopping 50% though:

It also brought some very minor (like below 1%) improvements to off-cache access time too. 🤣 at the dip in linear verify from my Quantum Fireball TM hard drive - seems there's an error on the surface that needs to be MHDD'd out. (I did pull it out of a 'goodie pile' at a recycler...)

Additional speed measurements pending, I will edit this post directly to avoid further disrupting the stream of posts in this forum.

how is your cache and dram timing? i feel that your dram performance seems quite fast while cache performance is rather slow compared to typical machines.

DRAM read states are 3-2-2-2. 1 write wait state.
L2 cache read burst is 2-1-1-1, 0 write wait state.
L2 cache configured as Burst W/B (odd considering there's only an 8KB TAG for 128KB), hidden refresh ON. L2 timings seem really fast for 20ns chips on 33MHz FSB. :^)
I have noticed that Cyrix 486s tend to have higher DRAM throughput compared to Intel/AMD 486s, despite having a somewhat slower L1 cache mechanism.

With 128KB cache, Doom Shareware comes in at 3431 realtics, down from 3645 without cache. With 256KB of cache (almost borked the board putting it on 🤣), it goes to 3348 realtics.

Eep386 wrote:

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, here's the modified BIOS, which might be helpful for anyone else with an MV035F that doesn't let them change any CMOS Setup options.

Eep386, I have a few MF035F Motherboards that I would like to use your BIOS to unlock the setup options. What utility do you use to flash the new BIOS? Does it have a backup function in case something goes wrong?
There are still a few industrial controllers that use these boards and I'm looking for a few more boards to purchase as spares.

Thanks

Sorry about the late post; old 486 boards do not usually support flashing EEPROMs from their sockets, so I used an old Al Needham PB-10 ISA EPROM burner to make BIOS chips. Your best and only backup would be the original BIOS chip in that case.

MWCMM wrote:

Eep386, I have a few MF035F Motherboards that I would like to use your BIOS to unlock the setup options. What utility do you use […]
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Eep386 wrote:

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, here's the modified BIOS, which might be helpful for anyone else with an MV035F that doesn't let them change any CMOS Setup options.

Eep386, I have a few MF035F Motherboards that I would like to use your BIOS to unlock the setup options. What utility do you use to flash the new BIOS? Does it have a backup function in case something goes wrong?
There are still a few industrial controllers that use these boards and I'm looking for a few more boards to purchase as spares.

Thanks

I have 2 boards from perle 594 systems, same mv035f boards just stripped down version for their system. not much on them, no memory or 486 chip will be included on them. Would you be interested in them?

@Eep386, did you keep a copy of the unmodified MV035F BIOS, and could you please post it?

Thanks, Robert

Really, this board uses the OPTi 802 chipset? I think I've seen these boards before and I thought they used the 895. 802 would be a fairly uncommon one.