First post, by BigMaQ
Hi,
I am Markus, 47 YO from Germany and just get somehow infected with the Retro - Virus - A Colleague gives me a 80286 - And I feel young again - I start to buy some damaged Motherboards and an Oscilloscope, only to find out, I can fix them easy with a Multimeter Only 😀 Also thanks to (I am not sure its allowed to promote YT - Channels, so lets "code" the names ->) "Hand out of Grave with GFX Card" and "APU Universe" from YT to showing some Hints how to fix stuff!
So my Mission now: Rebuild the 80486 DX2/66 from my childhood (i80486, 4 MB RAM, 210 MB HDD, Hercules Dynamite VLB GFX, Sound Blaster PRO)
Another thing, I keep in my Cupboard for many years is my good, old Cache Controller I bought for 378 DM end of the 90s.
I plug it in and it still stores some old HDD data from the 90s in it, wow... I run the Version 1.50 of Firmware, this can handle LBA.
But I saw, there is a v2.02 available. So I download it and flash it onto some freshly imported WinBond w27c512 - To test, this is working, I copy the old Chips with 1.50 over, it works.
Sadly, no luck with the 2.02 . There is no initialization (is that the right english word?).
I wonder about the following:
Old BIOS Chips are 64KB, new one I download only 32KB (512Kb/256Kb)
OLD BIOS got 3 Chips on, labeled as 1993 TEKRAM 1, 2 and 3, the download package I got only gives me 2 (Odd, Even, for exchange of Chip 2 and 3) - Is there no Chip 1 to change? This still contain the 1.50 Version.
I am happy if I can get some Info, maybe joined with a download Link to the right ROM 1 in 2.02
Edit: Found some more Infotmation. Looks like the 2.x FW needs only 2 ROMs and run the initial Boot code out of a „Stub ROM“ somewhere in the ASIC.
Thanks a lot for reading
greetings
MaQ