This is nice ~

Once we get to the stages of matching boards with pictures/bioses/manuals call me in. Oh and I'm not done uploading to elhvb.com yet. I just found a folder called "mirrors" on one of my disks. Surprise!

Looks like a great project! TH99 has helped me a lot in the past, but searching for what you actually got can be a real pain. Making it better searchable and get real pictures sounds almost too good! 😁

I've got some nice stuff laying around and can make some pictures of it, along with details like chipset numbers...
And maybe can provide new data for a few boards that don't seem to be included in TH99 😀
(And have to look into how to get a bios dump to share)
Looking forward to it 😀

evasive wrote on 2020-05-21, 18:05:

Once we get to the stages of matching boards with pictures/bioses/manuals call me in. Oh and I'm not done uploading to elhvb.com yet. I just found a folder called "mirrors" on one of my disks. Surprise!

That'd be great but there's one big bummer : POST strings. I haven't found a way to extract them out of a bios too unfortunately. Unless someone comes with a POST string extractor for Ami/award bioses, this will be a big problem 😒

on older BIOSes the strings are in plaintext though not always in the same place. Some sort of heuristics based search would be viable as the strings follow fairly predictable format.

For some of them, I believe a regex would be enough. But the more problematic ones are 386/486 bioses.
I'm sure there's still a way to do that, but I don't think I'm qualified enough to know what to do.

Awesome work guys (@Deksor & @Computerguy08.) If this is the result of the trainwreck that my thread was, than I'm happy I posted it, even if I had to take some minor abuse from bozos to get there. This would be a great thing to have around. Maybe you guys should combine efforts? I like the idea of putting it on Github & accepting contribs too.

A 'tags' feature would be really nice, so you could keep narrowing down results by selecting more tags, kind of like how Mobygames or Demozoo work. It would be a great help for those "what the crap is this board" unmarked, unbranded ones. E.g. selecting "AT" -> "Socket 7" -> "ALi Alladin 5" -> "3 ISA" -> "3 PCI" -> "AGP" -> "2 DIMMs" -> "2 SIMMs" yields a list of all the boards that fit that criteria. The users could add the tags after the fact once the functionality is there. Not sure how much work that would be to impliment.

It'd also be nice to be able to add new entries beyond what was in the original TH99 database, as long as quality is maintained & there's enough info submitted to fit the format. Maybe that's feature creep though.

Anyway, I'll happily use it once it's done. Cheers for the efforts!

Searchable by vendor, name, & bios string would be great

Would also be great if people could submit new entries for missing boards, bios images for existing boards, drivers for integrated devices, and if we are getting crazy, bench marks.

Well in my case, I started the project a year ago 😁 (but I had to pause it for a while because of studies).

What you're suggesting is pretty much what's possible at the moment with my project (except not the count of memory slots because it's not in TH99, but the type of memory slots is there if you pay attention to my search function).

I definitely want to add new entries beyond what was originally there. I'd like to expand it to the mid 2000's roughly (basically anything that support Windows 9x or less).

Basically my project is going to be an extension to www.win3x.org. I'm planning to release v1 soon which is like I said nearly finished, although it's not looking pretty at all, but I plan to add more features later (things such as suggesting drivers for motherboards based on the chipset, as well as uploading original driver disk images if someone sent one to us, etc).

Now some of the things added there (such as "30 pin simms") can't really be used as there are really not a lot of boards listed with them ...

xjas wrote on 2020-05-21, 19:45:

Maybe you guys should combine efforts?

We're planning that.

Indeed we do

Miphee wrote on 2020-05-21, 13:38:

It will still be buried under other sites and the only way to change that is to beat them in the clicking game. A few guys from […]
Show full quote

computerguy08 wrote on 2020-05-21, 13:24:

What if we combined the versatility of stason with the cleanness of TH99 ?

It will still be buried under other sites and the only way to change that is to beat them in the clicking game.
A few guys from here would know about it but others would still use the one that actually showed up first in Google: Stason.
You would get tired of it eventually.
There is only one way: taking down Stason for copyright infringement and creating a modern website in place of the old one.

Well the fact it'll end on win3x.org will surely help some more because it won't start from scratch on the click rate 😀

douglar wrote on 2020-05-21, 20:23:

Searchable by vendor, name, & bios string would be great

Would also be great if people could submit new entries for missing boards, bios images for existing boards, drivers for integrated devices, and if we are getting crazy, bench marks.

That would be fantastic . IMHO, the primary focus should be on motherboards . A lot of OEM ones, especially, have difficult to access or missing info .

Honestly, this has a good chance of generating a whole pile of positive publicity - imagine articles like "someone made a huge database of jumper settings for all your old hardware searchable & mobile-friendly using [insert web technology here]" running on Hackaday or wherever. Never mind that the database was already out there - making it into a useable, modern website is enough of an effort to generate some goodwill.*

[* but I guarantee some numpty in the comments will be all "they just stole this from Stason!"]

Total hardware 1999 is basically a steal from microhouse technical library anyways ^^

Gotta say, I endorse this idea! Would be nice to see TH99 with a new coat of paint.

Wiki format or at least user submissions is a great idea.

If you wanted to follow along with VOGONSDrivers and VOGONSWiki and call it VOGONSBoards or something, I would not necessarily be against that idea 😁 tho I did see that Deksor already had hosting plans.
(Or maybe it could be made part of VOGONSWiki somehow? I dunno... I mean, he already has the Falconfly subdomain, he could add another subdomain or wikify the content to merge with the main wiki)

waterbeesje wrote on 2020-05-21, 18:20:

And maybe can provide new data for a few boards that don't seem to be included in TH99 😀
(And have to look into how to get a bios dump to share)

Uniflash and a ZIF socket on a board you know is stable will get you a long way, look into the hotflash technique.
For much older boards (with ODD/EVEN chips) there are the Willem programmer or another more simple build yourself solution or any commercially available (E)EPROM programmers out there.

Love it! Will keep my eye on this project.

Awesome project. A few ideas:
- User uploadable content and comments section. This would allow better real images of the boards, retail boxes, PDF user manuals, BIOS files, BIOS or boot screenshots, drivers, software disk images, links to wayback machine archived sites, Vogons threads, YouTube review videos, etc.
- Power searches as already mentioned, so we can search by feature set, BIOS ID, name, manufacturer, year, slot types, etc.
- Organize data into easily viewable tables or sections. Jumper settings, CPU/RAM supported, slot types and card types supported, known issues, etc.
- A basic portable version that includes an offline XAMPP server for hosting on an offline computer. Could easily transport on a USB stick or phone. GitHub would be a good place to host it and keep it updated.
- Mobile phone friendly browsing.
- CSS support for colored themes for the site (day/night/modern/retro).
- User accounts to control access for the online hosted version.
- Benchmark results (standardized tests)

For me, the content will be user uploadable, but I'll have to be reviewed by authorized people first (that's how win3x.org works for software uploading, and it's been working that way very well for over 15 years so that's definitely "bullet proof" 😁).

As for the jumper settings, I've simply removed them from the database, only to put them into a .pdf as a simple manual ^^. Also I've managed to extract documents from Microhouse Technical Library (1998 edition, so not as many boards are covered, but many are) and turned these old word 2.0 .doc files into .pdf files which look much nicer than the TH99 ones.
Here's an example :

Also if you didn't pay attention, I added this feature which will probably be very helpful for newbies to troubleshoot their motherboards 😀

This field at the moment can contain "Fake cache" "Leaky battery" "Bad dallas RTC chip" "bad electrolytic capacitors" "bad tantalum caps" and "underpowered AGP slot". That way if someone has reported a board having one of these issues, it'll be noted there and other peope finding this board will be warned about potential issues.

I have even bigger plans for this, but I'll talk about them when the whole site will be turned into a database and that most key features for it will be done (driver uploading, etc).

For now, only the motherboard section is turned into a database (there's more than 5000 motherboards documented there !), and I'll release it soon. Not every feature will be there yet (I need to work a lot more to add driver upload with what I want to do) but once I'm satisfied with it, I'll move on to turn the rest into a database and let users improve it afterwards 😀

Also since we all agree that we want content user uploadable, I think we should find a way to make new "jumper manuals". The PDFs from MTL seem to be a good source as the schematics there contain vectorized assets, but I can't think of any tools that would let me extract this data and then re-use it in a program to make new images. What do you think ?