VOGONS


Reply 21 of 59, by vmr_

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feipoa wrote:

I tested my POD133 on my Batman's Revenge board and it appeared to work ok.

By the way, what OS you run on the Pentium 60 machine? Win 95 or Win 98?

Planning to build one for fun&testing in the comming weeks, will try first with Win 98SE (afterall, it worked fairly well on Nexgen P90)

Retro builds & sandbox
IBM XT 5160 | 286 | 386 | 486 | S4 SI5PI AIO & S4 Batman + P60 SX828
S8 & PPro 200 | SS7 FW 5VGF & Asus P5A & AOpen AX59PRO K6-III+ 550MHz
Asus K7M Athlon 1Ghz GDF | Abit SH6 Pentium III 1GHz SL4KL...

Reply 23 of 59, by feipoa

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Anyone have the BIOS for this board? I want to try it on my Acer V12P, which has a similar layout.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 25 of 59, by feipoa

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Oh, thank you! The BIOS on my board is 1.00.10.AF2T. Not sure what the T is for. It seems to be missing in the part number you provided. I did notice that some of these boards on eBay were missing the PCI chipset, but not sure if this is related to T or no T. I'll be sure to backup the existing BIOS first.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 26 of 59, by Windows9566

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feipoa wrote:

Oh, thank you! The BIOS on my board is 1.00.10.AF2T. Not sure what the T is for. It seems to be missing in the part number you provided. I did notice that some of these boards on eBay were missing the PCI chipset, but not sure if this is related to T or no T. I'll be sure to backup the existing BIOS first.

T means that it's gateway OEM, the letters (AF2/BS0/CN0/DH0) is the motherboard and the last letter (J, T, R, U) is the OEM brand like J is dell, T is gateway, U is AST, and R is packard bell

R5 5600X, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3060 TI, Win11
P3 600, 256 MB RAM, nVidia Riva TNT2 M64, SB Vibra 16S, Win98
PMMX 200, 128 MB RAM, S3 Virge DX, Yamaha YMF719, Win95
486DX2 66, 32 MB RAM, Trident TGUI9440, ESS ES688F, DOS

Reply 27 of 59, by amadeus777999

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Windows9566 wrote:
feipoa wrote:

Oh, thank you! The BIOS on my board is 1.00.10.AF2T. Not sure what the T is for. It seems to be missing in the part number you provided. I did notice that some of these boards on eBay were missing the PCI chipset, but not sure if this is related to T or no T. I'll be sure to backup the existing BIOS first.

T means that it's gateway OEM, the letters (AF2/BS0/CN0/DH0) is the motherboard and the last letter (J, T, R, U) is the OEM brand like J is dell, T is gateway, U is AST, and R is packard bell

Nice to know!

Reply 28 of 59, by feipoa

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Interesting how they didn't pick G for Gateway, P for Packard Bell, etc... They wanted to be cryptic.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 29 of 59, by feipoa

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sonicx wrote:

I think the last bios for this motherboard had version 1.00.13.AF2
http://download.viglen.co.uk/files/motherboar … ge/10013AF2.EXE

I attempted to update this BIOS to my motherboard using Intel's fmup.exe utility, but I receive an error message.

The selected FLASH Data File cannot be used for updating FLASH memory. Either this FLASH Data File is invalid for this system or the information contained in this File is corrupted.

Do I need to find the same file but with a T suffix, e.g. 10013AF2T.exe ? Or is there an old Gateway ftp portal I need to browse around? Alternately, is there another utility that will properly update the BIOS on this board? I tried uniflash, but it crashed upon loading. Is there an AMI flashing tool which will work with this motherboard? And if there is, will it know that there appear to be two BIOS files for this board which somehow work together: 1013AF2_.BIO and 1013AF2_.BI1

This is my first foray into programming BIOSes on Intel produced boards and it hasn't been very straight-forward. Unfortunately the EEPROM BIOS is surface mount.

If someone were to make a copy of their 1.00.13.AF2 BIOS while in the system using NSSI, which software could I use to program that file onto my motherboard?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 30 of 59, by SETBLASTER

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can anyone explain how to identify these boards just by looking at them?..

how do you know that it is a:

a) Premiere/PCI Expandable Desktop (Batman)

or a

b) Premiere/PCI ED (Batman's Revenge)

???

Reply 31 of 59, by Horun

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Board part number, other than that they looked the same on basic visual inspection afaik. Back then the Intel boards were numbered on a small white label, sometimes there were more than one so not as easy to figure out specially if OEM'd to Compaq, HP or other. Sorry is late will do some digging tomorrow...

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 33 of 59, by evasive

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PBA 631022-103, B00348201, AA 634019-009, AMIBIOS 1.00.**.AF2T

The extra T in the bios identifier makes this an OEM version for Gateway 2000.
It is a Premiere/PCI ED (Batman's Revenge)

Reply 34 of 59, by mpe

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I think it is inconclusive. I'd love to know the answer.

There are several board numbers. Also the official name of the former board is probably "Classic/PCI Pentium".

There are several revisions and OEM variants and hardware differences and clues in the manual (power regulator for 66 MHz operation, position of RTC, socketed Dallas, number of IDE channels, no slow/fast fan header). But it looks like there are always boards which break those rules.

I think Intel at one point switched to AF2 BIOS and called it Batman's Revenge.

Last edited by mpe on 2020-05-10, 11:21. Edited 1 time in total.

Blog|NexGen 586|S4

Reply 35 of 59, by evasive

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The help document I have on the Batman/Batman's Revenge lists Fab A/B/C for the Batman each of which have one or more revisions and 12 revisions for the Batman's Revenge 60/66MHz board. This is just for 1994 and 1995, I don't know until when these were produced and how many more versions/revisions are in existence.

Intel was constantly revising their boards on a hardware level as good and as fast as possible. I think there's a reason there were using a 6+3 -position board number and then another 6+3 alteration number.

Reply 36 of 59, by SETBLASTER

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my board white sticker says

AA 624415-211

sticker on bios says 625989-001

there is a orange sticker that has U00993101

is it a Batman ? or is it a Batman revenge?

i never owned a socket4, got it very cheap with other stuff, and i dont even have a cpu to test it.

Reply 37 of 59, by evasive

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SETBLASTER wrote on 2020-05-31, 01:51:
my board white sticker says […]
Show full quote

my board white sticker says

AA 624415-211

sticker on bios says 625989-001

there is a orange sticker that has U00993101

is it a Batman ? or is it a Batman revenge?

i never owned a socket4, got it very cheap with other stuff, and i dont even have a cpu to test it.

That is a Batman's Revenge with the 1.00.09.AF2 bios and it looks like retail Intel version.

Reply 38 of 59, by SETBLASTER

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thanks. i bough a box full of hardware for 10bucks and this motherboard was on it ,plus a lot of cpus including an athlon xp mobile 2800+ , ram,slockets.

first i need to buy a cpu for it, but looking at the hightreason videos on youtube, i dont expect much when building this system because they seem to have lots of problems

Reply 39 of 59, by auron

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the only real issue i had with my batman's revenge was a bricked BIOS, because apparently inserting a SCSI adapter will do that when the flash write protect jumper is off, which it is by default. was a very easy fix with intel's recovery floppy though. also the RTC needs to be sorted or else you'll only be able to use 528 MB HDD space, because LBA is off by default in the BIOS. i just put a socket in mine to replace it, hacking a battery to the existing one is messy and ugly. for cooling, it's possible to adapt certain socket 7/370 coolers with bending. the batman's revenge has the extra tabs for this on the CPU socket and i haven't seen them on any other socket 4 board so far, but one needs to be careful to not snap off the smd ceramic cap underneath.

performance-wise, the board does show remarkably poor memory bandwidth and i still wonder if it's possible to do anything about that with BIOS editing tools. other than that it's within the region of a fast 486, but everyone probably already knows about that by now even without owning the hardware. never encountered any RZ1000 issues due to patched BIOS.

regarding batman vs. batman's revenge identification, i posted some differences here: Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today according to all pictures i've seen, this holds true (i.e. boards with '93 datecodes on the chips have no cap in the socket, etc.).