No love for Acer systems 'eh? Seems like other proprietary manufacturers like Dell, Gateway, Compaq, Packard Bell, and IBM get more attention 'round these parts. Acer is still producing systems though, which is quite shocking. How was the Acer brand back in the 90's compared to the others? Mid-range? Unheard of?

Can't help much with the bios although the only version that's ever mentioned on forums is , like yours, v1.2R1.6 so perhaps there were no updates.

A correct case for the board is probably the one you have already, even though the V12P was used in both desktop and tower systems, based on FCC IDs

GQ8V12P-IDAB 1994-08-16 Tower Computer GQ8V12P-IDT 1994-04-29 Tower Computer GQ8V12P-ID3P 1994-04-29 Desktop Computer GQ8V12P-ID […]
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GQ8V12P-IDAB 1994-08-16 Tower Computer
GQ8V12P-IDT 1994-04-29 Tower Computer
GQ8V12P-ID3P 1994-04-29 Desktop Computer
GQ8V12P-IDU 1994-03-09 PCI Tower Computer

GQ8V20-IDAB 1994-05-25 Tower Computer
GQ8V20-ID3P 1994-05-25 Desktop Computer

If you look at the attached pictures in this eBay link https://www.ebay.com/itm/143260518165 you'll see an Acer branded V20-based system in the exact same case you have. Based on its FCC ID GQ8V20-IDAB it would be safe to assume that the equivalent V12P based system GQ8V12P-IDAB also used this case.

Would be nice to have an actual photo with the V12P sticker over the Compudyne logo though.

I'm tempted to modify my Intel Batman's Revenge board for a normal AT keyboard and plug it into this Acer case, but another part of me wants to keep it all Acer.

It is a bit messy, but is there nothing on ftp://ftp.acer.co.uk/Archiv/ ?

Can't seem to find it in there. Base on information sourced form the internet, the V12P socket 4 motherboard was in an Acer system called "Power 560"

The system is currently having this weird issue whereby right-clicking the Desktop to show the Display Properties is rebooting the system. The screen goes black, then flickers like it is changing the resolution or refresh rate, then reboots. I can't setup the display adapter beyond Standard PCI VGA Display Adapter. Anyone know of a solution to this behavior?

feipoa wrote:

Can't seem to find it in there. Base on information sourced form the internet, the V12P socket 4 motherboard was in an Acer system called "Power 560"

Only I can find with crawling through is the V12lc bios info.
ftp://ftp.acer.co.uk/Archiv/desktop/mainboard/v12lc/bios/

I have no idea if it has a comparable bios, only thing I see in the index is that there are version with and without onboard vga.
No V12P bios is to be found..

Good(ish) news and bad news!

First the good - I've found mention of later bioses(2) on archives of the Acer Germany support site. Your bios seems to have been the latest until mid-1996 then between then and mid 1997 there was a V2.0 R01-D0 released

mid '96 - https://web.archive.org/web/19961023173211/ht … chInfo/BIOS.txt
mid'97 - https://web.archive.org/web/19970626171151/ht … chInfo/BIOS.txt

By early '98 there was another one listed - v1.2R1.6S1 with LBA-mode support - https://web.archive.org/web/19980201191745/ht … chInfo/bios.htm

Now the bad - I can't find either.

Perhaps contact Donutking since he also had this board?
Socket 4 Pentium

I did send Donutking a PM.

That's some really nice digging. I'd love to get my hands on either of those BIOSes. The only one with a file name association is the second one, and its v12p16s1.bin , but turns up nothing.

I sent Donutking a PM.

That's some really nice digging. I'd love to get my hands on either of those BIOSes. The only one with a file name association is the second one, and its v12p16s1.bin , but turns up nothing.

Any simple means to automatically search all country prefixes for acer ftp's without login credential? Lots of ftp sites with easy access on .tw.com.

I think Acer had a pretty good reputation until the mid 90s. They used to do more server related stuff, and even had their own system bus called "Acer Frame". I think things started going south once the socket5 stuff started coming out.

Well this motherboard looks pretty well built, not quite as solid as the Intel one, but pretty good. It has this interesting row of solder points, two parallel rows, around the SMD cache chips. Apparently, there was a very rare 512K cache upgrade module that would plug in there. I don't know if it was ever produced though. There is also a jumper setting for "Burst SRAM cache" I'm not sure what that is for, but the system wouldn't boot with the jumper set. I have to use "Standard SRAM cache".

The board could use a BIOS update. I wonder if the guys in Taiwan still have it somewhere.

Well, until later socket 370 they did build alot of machines based on "normal" motherboards without too much cheaping out on them. After that they went downhill very fast. Since two years they atleast are trying to improve their quality again.. but it is now really late trying to improve their image again...

Good to see another socket 4 system - the cache configuration is kinda funky from a spatial viewpoint. Not the common "arrow" one. If one were to solder connectors onto the board would it be possible to use a coast like cache configuration... albeit I guess the "format" is most likely proprietary.

feipoa wrote:

I sent Donutking a PM.

That's some really nice digging. I'd love to get my hands on either of those BIOSes. The only one with a file name association is the second one, and its v12p16s1.bin , but turns up nothing.

Any simple means to automatically search all country prefixes for acer ftp's without login credential? Lots of ftp sites with easy access on .tw.com.

All the current Acer ftp sites seem to be mirrors of each other now - think they changed their entire global http & ftp structure somewhere between 1999-2001, which is where much of the now missing stuff disappeared to. If you look at this link (http front end to the then ftp site you'll see - and yes the end file links are all dead)

https://web.archive.org/web/20001204145600/ht … =deu&ftpdir=/pc

In these instances I think a better way to search is using the various ftp indexer sites, although I had already tried these (Mamont, Napalm FTP, GlobalFileSearch) before my last post. The current Acer sites are included with such search engines, but I had no luck with any version of either of the bios filenames, though I did find some links under an AcerPower directory in Taiwan for your V20 board, and others.

I'm even beginning to wonder why those other versions were created, given that the link in this post takes you to your existing version - with a claimed upload date spring 1999 and still available in January 2001. Speculation I know, but perhaps the V2.0 one was for a hardware revision on the board, and the one with LBA mode was to support and end user technical request - who knows.

So I guess another board owner or Acer themselves might still be your best bet.

Thanks a lot for your additional skills at researching this. I did start a thread on the Acer community forum asking for a BIOS update, but seems unlikely. https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/5740 … t-4-motherboard

feipoa wrote on 2019-08-12, 11:35:

Thanks a lot for your additional skills at researching this. I did start a thread on the Acer community forum asking for a BIOS update, but seems unlikely. https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/5740 … t-4-motherboard

Dear feipoa,
I'd kindly like to ask, whether you have managed to get a BIOS image for this board since then? Someone gave me a motherboard of the same type, (although the BIOS chip has been lost) so this topic would be of great interest to me too...

I never found an update. Best I can do would be to copy my existing BIOS. However, I'm knee deep in digging up my foundation and water proofing it. This will go on for a month. When I'm ready for a break, I'll try to pull out my Acer system and image the BIOS for ya if you are still interested?