WJG6260 wrote on 2022-11-09, 16:45:

One note about the Elegance P90’s BIOS that might be of interest to you: on the Socket 5 version of this board (and presumably, on your board with the appropriate adapter), you can run a WinChip, WinChip2, and even a POD MMX without issue. This is not the case for most Pentium/VL BIOSes.

I seem to have a similar issue with my Acer J3 motherboard and Socket4 CPU card. BIOS doesn't like non-Intel CPUs. Sadly, the OPTi chipset on my board is pretty rare. At least I'm not aware of any other board that uses it (693/696).

I wonder if Jan or any others here can take a look at the Acer BIOS on your J3. Perhaps it's as simple as the modifications done to run a K6-2 on a more "usual" OPTi VL/Pentium system. Seems like, at least in the case of AWARD BIOSes, there's a write to MSR 2 instruction that can mess with non-Intel CPUs. I wonder why the Elegance P90's Phoenix BIOS couldn't care less about non-Intel CPUs? Maybe Northgate didn't really modify the BIOS much?