I don't see P2B-VT listed.. hardware incompatibility?

Black6spdZ wrote on 2024-03-02, 20:35:

I don't see P2B-VT listed.. hardware incompatibility?

Only mods having been tested at least once on real hardware (and those closely related to tested ones) have been published.

Regarding the P2B-VT, the last time we encountered one it was driven by a Phoenix BIOS (not Award), so the mod wasn't applicable. The name is used for OEM boards and describes at least two different boards, using either a 440BX or a VIA Apollo 133.

Do you have one with an Award BIOS?

Is there any way of disabling the PnP extension on the BIOS? (I have the P3B-F)
I'm in the process of building my own sound card based on the Crystal CS4237B, and while the modded BIOS works like a champ I'd love to be able to play around with having the CS chip be untouched by the PnP initialization routines at boot time.
I tried using the CBROM utility to remove the "AWARDEXT.ROM" part of the BIOS, thinking that it might be it - but it looks like the PnP stuff is part of the main BIOS code?

I think it's the bios setup option PNP OS yes/no. If you set it to yes, then bios doesn't configure PNP devices.

Zerthimon wrote on 2024-03-19, 16:01:

I think it's the bios setup option PNP OS yes/no. If you set it to yes, then bios doesn't configure PNP devices.

Correct

maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-03-19, 21:46:

Zerthimon wrote on 2024-03-19, 16:01:

I think it's the bios setup option PNP OS yes/no. If you set it to yes, then bios doesn't configure PNP devices.

Correct

Well, it detects and lists the cards regardless of the PnP OS setting, making me think it still runs the enumeration, isolation and initialization processes - which is what I'd like to avoid.
Of course the easiest course of action would be to test my sound card on an older motherboard made before PnP (~1994/95), but I don't have one at hand at the moment, that's why I was asking whether it was possible to disable the PnP extension on the modded BIOS.

I am trying to modify a Chaintech CT6VIA3 bios to recognize a VIA C3 1200A cpu and it seems that after reading this topic this has been done for a CUBX-E with 1008cu004_20230709.
is it just a case of extracting the microcode from it and adding that to my bios using CBROM or is there more to it?

Hey all! P2B-B v1.01 and P3B-F 1.03 owner here, I was stoked to find this thread as I've been trying for a couple months to get a Coppermine or Tualatin operational in a AT board for a cool IBM 5155 build I've been working on. I see that P2B-B support is new. Has anyone had any luck with this board? I wasnt having much luck with the stock beta BIOS with coppermine or newer cpus. Anyone need any experiments performed? I have successfully flashed my board with this BIOS, and have a DIP programmer for recovery if something goes wrong. I have several varieties of slockets, some katmai, coppermine, and tualatin cpus, some tualatons are coppermine modded, some not, and would be happy to help with testing. My board has been modded to add jumperfree support by adding a pin header to the JEN pads, though I've been having a fair amount of difficulty getting jumper free to behave. Anyways, long story short, if anyone has any tips to get a coppermine or coppermine modded Tualatin working in the P2B-B, awesome, I'd love to hear them, and if not, I'd love to be of help testing anything needed to assist with P2B-B bios development.

Was wondering if you would add 128gb+ support & anything else useful to the ASUS PVI-486SP3 ?

The latest bios is AWARD core version 4.51 (https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/bios/si4i … ff906840735.zip)

Sounds absolutely crazy i know, but it will allow any 7200rpm drive to work\any SATA drive on a adapter with the ability to load up multiple FAT16 or FAT32 Partitions with an entire 30gb+ library of DOS games\soundbanks etc!

Eivind wrote on 2024-03-19, 12:12:

I tried using the CBROM utility to remove the "AWARDEXT.ROM" part of the BIOS, thinking that it might be it - but it looks like the PnP stuff is part of the main BIOS code?

Pretty much, yes. AWARDEXT.ROM contains integral parts of the setup code (i.e. the menu logic and strings for BIOS setup), so removing it will break the BIOS menu.

I'm currently not sure which part of the logic exactly remains after setting the PnP setup option to "Disabled" ...

mrdjey wrote on 2024-03-29, 13:18:

I am trying to modify a Chaintech CT6VIA3 bios to recognize a VIA C3 1200A cpu and it seems that after reading this topic this has been done for a CUBX-E with 1008cu004_20230709.
is it just a case of extracting the microcode from it and adding that to my bios using CBROM or is there more to it?

Via C3 processors don't know the concept of microcode updates, so extracting/adding microcode update files will only affect Intel processors. For the mods here, BIOS logic had to be changed. The most important changes make sure the BIOS can correctly enable/disable the L2 cache and skip any microcode update attempt. The rest is mostly cosmetical.

So the question would be: Is there anything that doesn't work as expected with a C3 on your board (aside from wrong info printed on POST)?

dparks256 wrote on 2024-04-04, 04:15:

Hey all! P2B-B v1.01 and P3B-F 1.03 owner here, I was stoked to find this thread as I've been trying for a couple months to get a Coppermine or Tualatin operational in a AT board for a cool IBM 5155 build I've been working on. I see that P2B-B support is new. Has anyone had any luck with this board? I wasnt having much luck with the stock beta BIOS with coppermine or newer cpus. Anyone need any experiments performed? I have successfully flashed my board with this BIOS, and have a DIP programmer for recovery if something goes wrong. I have several varieties of slockets, some katmai, coppermine, and tualatin cpus, some tualatons are coppermine modded, some not, and would be happy to help with testing. My board has been modded to add jumperfree support by adding a pin header to the JEN pads, though I've been having a fair amount of difficulty getting jumper free to behave. Anyways, long story short, if anyone has any tips to get a coppermine or coppermine modded Tualatin working in the P2B-B, awesome, I'd love to hear them, and if not, I'd love to be of help testing anything needed to assist with P2B-B bios development.

Someone wrote me an email and used the BIOS mod with a Coppermine 1000 (133 x 7.5), so in general it should work, assuming a compatible PWM controller chip is on board. Not sure if that's a given on all P2B-Bs. According to the ASUS web site, Coppermine support officially starts from board revision 1.02.

Does any Coppermine work with your board at all?

We experimented a bit with JEN, but jumperfree support in this BIOS version is pretty incomplete. We couldn't get the menu settings to stay applied.

SWZSSR wrote on 2024-04-04, 06:21:

Was wondering if you would add 128gb+ support & anything else useful to the ASUS PVI-486SP3 ?

The latest bios is AWARD core version 4.51 (https://theretroweb.com/motherboard/bios/si4i … ff906840735.zip)

Sounds absolutely crazy i know, but it will allow any 7200rpm drive to work\any SATA drive on a adapter with the ability to load up multiple FAT16 or FAT32 Partitions with an entire 30gb+ library of DOS games\soundbanks etc!

That would be a whole new platform to disassemble. Not sure which of the mods from the thread here would apply(?).

Drives above 128 GB would mean adding LBA48 support, which I will not try to implement on my own. There's a better chance to get this working by using an extension ROM like XTIDE.