I’ve extracted a BIOS image from the rom chip of my dead 486 motherboard.
Which application can I use to read the BIOS details from the BIN image such as the name, version, date etc…?
Use any hex editor and you should be able to see the text strings
If it is an Award compressed bios (signified by -lh5 in first line): Use 7zip to open and extract the original.tmp (or whatever is named inside) then hex edit it and you can read lots !.
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
The Retro Web has a bot in their discord that will take apart a BIOS that you upload (mostly to check if it's a duplicate, I think). I don't know if they have an offline version.
"strings" is a Unix utility with plenty of other ports (including Sysinternals for Windows) that just looks for printable strings in a file. That will give you the POST string, BIOS date, etc.
As Horun mentioned, Award BIOSes are parsable as an .LHA file to decompress them. For AMI compressed, there is a utility out there called AMIDECO.
Thank you for the feedback.
There seems to be an application called 86Box which can boot the BIOS. That's awesome, I'll definitely be looking into that.
