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What are the most used types of roms in PCs ?

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First post, by Deksor

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Hello ! I just bought a TL866 II Plus, and I wanted to know which types of roms are the most used because I'd like to buy some spare to do some tests with not working hardware as well as updating/upgrading some stuff.

I know that DIP32 roms used on pentiums/pentium 2 (and even some pentium 3/athlon) can be swapped, but I don't know which models are used. I'd also like to tinker with 386/486 stuff which uses 64KB DIP28 roms instead and also 8088/286 stuff which uses ... some kind of rom (I know that my 8088 has one 8KB rom chip, but I was never able to read anything from it and the computer has two rom spots but only one populated)

Thanks in advance 😀

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 1 of 2, by jesolo

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Based on my own tinkering for the past year or so, I would say, on 386 & 486 boards, it's the 27C512 (or 64 KB) EPROM (UV erasable) chips. However, when you swop them out, you can use standard EEPROM (electrically erasable) chips - you do, however, still need to flash & erase these chips with an EEPROM burner (like the one you bought).
It was only towards the very late 486 era (with the introduction of PCI slots on 486 motherboards) that they started to use EEPROM (electrically erasable) chips that would enable you to flash the BIOS directly on the motherboard.

To find 27C512 EEPROM chips &, to an extend, 27C256 EEPROM chips are fairly common. Finding smaller sized ROM's that are electrically erasable seems to be less common (at least, on eBay) - this means that you have to also source a UV eraser to wipe the contents of EPROM chips.

Reply 2 of 2, by Deksor

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Thanks for your answer !

I can live with UV eproms, but I need to know what kind of roms XTs are using. All I can read on my XT's rom is "PH2.52 BIOSO-0080" (Basically, Phoenix 2.52 Bios rom ... not very helpful). I'd also like to know which roms are using computer from Pentium up to P3 era.

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

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