There's a bit of commentary about them on redhill.net.au.

They should both work. My experience is Award had worse QA and more embarrassing/showstopper bugs. Like the 32GB disk lockup bug, and the Year 2094 bug.

AMI alienated their customers for a while with WinBIOS, but then in the 2010s, the whole industry decided to give it another go. Sigh.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-02-23, 00:49:

AMI alienated their customers for a while with WinBIOS, but then in the 2010s, the whole industry decided to give it another go. Sigh.

What, really ? 😯 How? I absolutely loved WinBIOS! It looked like Windows 3!
What kind of people wouldn't like that!? 😟

Also, Compaq did same with its setup utilities on hidden hard-disk partitions.
Except that Compaq had used an actual MS-DOS/Windows installation! 😨
WinBIOS merely looked like Windows and used VGA text-mode with a custom font. 🙂

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-02-23, 00:49:

There's a bit of commentary about them on redhill.net.au.

They should both work. My experience is Award had worse QA and more embarrassing/showstopper bugs. Like the 32GB disk lockup bug, and the Year 2094 bug.

AMI alienated their customers for a while with WinBIOS, but then in the 2010s, the whole industry decided to give it another go. Sigh.

Well, I flashed the Award BIOS, seems to work fine, POST is a bit faster.

I like AMI but specifically NOT the Intel chipset AMIs with the boring ass gray setup screens and lacking boot logos (Award Modular copied that old sequence and kept at it for decades)

I mentally associate AMI with 386-486s and Award with PCI 486s to Phenoms. My current main's an AMI but the setup interface looks coincidentally like PSO....

Award in the 486 era did a silly palette fade-out of the energy star logo that could potentially delay booting.

One interesting thing, though I changed two things so unfortunately I can't 100% be sure it was the BIOS change, but I was having intermittent hangs at boot when it went to detect the PnP ISA devices (I have an SB16 installed) with the AMI BIOS. It was bad enough that I pulled the card. But, then I cleaned the card, dried it, then put it back in after the Award flash (to see if it still hung), and it no longer hangs on POST, but of course now I'm unsure as to whether it was the BIOS or the cleaning that fixed it.

I will note that it DOES hang (blinking cursor, never gets back to the GUI) if you go into DOS mode and then try to exit back into Windows (not sure if that's the SB16 or not though, could be the NVidia drivers). If you use the restart into DOS gaming mode shortcut (that's actually a reboot), it works fine.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-02-23, 01:04:

What, really ? 😯 How? I absolutely loved WinBIOS! It looked like Windows 3!
What kind of people wouldn't like that!? 😟

The kind that changes the following as the first thing after installation:

BootGUI=1 -> BootGUI=0
id:5:initdefault: -> id:3:initdefault:
systemctl set-default graphical.target -> systemctl set-default multi-user.target
etc...

In other words: people like ME 😜