The last character changes because of the KBC, it has nothing to do with the bios itself. And if you look closely, they're different on each boards 😀

If you try to run this BIOS in a VM it'll probably have yet a sligthly different POST string.

No need to worry ^^

Wow thanks, never noticed before. Yes the KBC are both AMI but have diff serials. Mine has the AMI KBC 236480 as in #50 so would assume it has bios version with the KD suffix. Think it is time for a beer 😀

Deksor wrote on 2020-08-25, 23:40:

The last character changes because of the KBC, it has nothing to do with the bios itself. And if you look closely, they're different on each boards 😀

If you try to run this BIOS in a VM it'll probably have yet a sligthly different POST string.

No need to worry ^^

Oh, that's interesting and good to know! Thanks!

Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-27, 19:35:

#6
Manufacturer/Identifier: AST 3G Plus

Status: Card is working, also with IC missing compared to #4

The missing IC next to the 26-pin header is most likely a parallel port interface chip, for a MDA/Hercules-like parallel port at address 3BCh. Keep in mind that the EGA was meant as either an enhanced MDA (modes 7 and 0Fh) or an enhanced CGA (all other modes), selectable by DIP switches.

Indeed, good idea! Makes sense, also because there is the connector on top of the socket...

Re: 80386 BIOS image collection

FIC board confirmed thanks to the POST string 😁. I added the photo and the bios to UH19 😉

douglar wrote on 2020-09-15, 23:40:

That's a sharp looking board. […]
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Predator99 wrote on 2020-09-15, 07:26:

#70

That's a sharp looking board.

Predator99 wrote on 2020-08-12, 08:25:

#67

Because too many simm slots never was and never will be a thing!!

Agree those boards look great! Comments actually go here douglar. Not in the actual BIOS post thread, less confusion that way if the topic got a flood of posts about something. Just sayin 😀

Can some mod edit this entry? Re: 80486 BIOS image collection

Predator99 wrote on 2018-06-18, 14:32:

#6
Manufacturer/Identifier:
Chipset: SiS 85C407

It's clearly a Soyo 025J2, the last "2" indicating it has 256kb of cache. Part of the Soyo 025J/K/L family. The chipset would be SiS 85C471

And here's the manual with all the info: https://web.archive.org/web/20041210200849/ht … 86/25J-MU43.PDF

hello, anyone have CACHING TECH CORPORATION C386MX? please i need bios dump for this motherboard ...

kdr wrote on 2020-10-09, 02:26:

Card fails to POST, error beep is long-short-short-short, and then the system freezes/fails to boot.

That actually is the post code for "EGA video memory bad". "long short short" would be "non-EGA memory bad" (i.e. CGA or MDA) . No idea why they included a memory test for the non-EGA card into the EGA ROM POST routine, but they did...

mkarcher wrote on 2020-10-09, 23:30:

No idea why they included a memory test for the non-EGA card into the EGA ROM POST routine, but they did...

On the XT motherboard, you're supposed to set SW5&6 to the "no video card" option when installing the EGA. Those switches tell the XT BIOS not to initialize a video adapter, which means that the XT BIOS also skips past the video card presence test. If you didn't do this, and the only video adapter installed was an EGA, the XT BIOS would fail the video test and beep an error. So when the EGA BIOS gets control, it has to decide (by examining its switch configuration) whether or not to try and initialize an MDA or CGA adapter. If the EGA BIOS doesn't do it, then any MDA/CGA card would remain uninitialized.

Strange things happen when SW5&6 are set to MDA or CGA but yet there is an EGA card installed. In this case, the XT BIOS will initialize the MDA/CGA card and then pass control to the EGA BIOS (because the scan for a video bios in C000-C7FF range is unconditional).

At which point shenanigans might happen because the EGA BIOS doesn't expect the MDA/CGA to already be up and running -- not sure exactly what does / does not go wrong in this scenario.

kdr wrote on 2020-10-09, 23:50:

Strange things happen when SW5&6 are set to MDA or CGA but yet there is an EGA card installed. In this case, the XT BIOS will initialize the MDA/CGA card and then pass control to the EGA BIOS (because the scan for a video bios in C000-C7FF range is unconditional).

At which point shenanigans might happen because the EGA BIOS doesn't expect the MDA/CGA to already be up and running -- not sure exactly what does / does not go wrong in this scenario.

Good point!

I suppose it goes wrong in a slightly different way: The EGA card powers on with the memory range bits in the timing sequencer and the base port select bit in the miscelleneous output register in random states, so the EGA before POST may or may not conflict at random with either the CGA or MDA card. The EGA POST that ensures a proper non-conflicting configuration of the EGA card is thus needed before you may initialize the MDA or CGA card.

Am386DX-40 wrote on 2020-10-08, 16:59:

Can some mod edit this entry? Re: 80486 BIOS image collection […]
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Can some mod edit this entry? Re: 80486 BIOS image collection

Predator99 wrote on 2018-06-18, 14:32:

#6
Manufacturer/Identifier:
Chipset: SiS 85C407

It's clearly a Soyo 025J2, the last "2" indicating it has 256kb of cache. Part of the Soyo 025J/K/L family. The chipset would be SiS 85C471

And here's the manual with all the info: https://web.archive.org/web/20041210200849/ht … 86/25J-MU43.PDF

Changed, thanks!

p1p1p1 wrote on 2020-10-08, 23:15:

hello, anyone have CACHING TECH CORPORATION C386MX? please i need bios dump for this motherboard ...

Picture would be helpful?

Re: 80486 BIOS image collection

http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/3206
Hmm they seem to be a pretty close match . Their jumpers aren't 100% identical, but those which match are labeled exactly the same (Jp16 between the VLB slots, JP11/JP9 nearby the cache , etc). IPC is a computer builder iirc, right ? So maybe they used this board in their machines ?

Deksor wrote on 2020-10-10, 10:14:

Re: 80486 BIOS image collection

http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/3206
Hmm they seem to be a pretty close match . Their jumpers aren't 100% identical, but those which match are labeled exactly the same (Jp16 between the VLB slots, JP11/JP9 nearby the cache , etc). IPC is a computer builder iirc, right ? So maybe they used this board in their machines ?

I believe you are right, was looking that over a few days ago. My assumption is that reference is 4077C R01, my board is R02 (ass no: 4116328000xx-R02) and has 25, 33, 40 and 50Mhz clock settings, otherwise is generally accurate. Am going to use that info as a template plus the silk screen off the board and build my own mini doc. Just finished the picture, just need to create/modify the jumper settings. Another computer system that used these boards was found thru archive.org but no manuals, just the board reference.

By "reverse-engineering" Microhouse Technical Library which is the source of Total Hardware 1999 we managed to extract the images from the documents. Originally they were made with Word 2.0 in a proprietary vector image type.
But thanks to mR_Slug and scorp, we managed to extract them and turn them into .svg files which you can easily edit with a program like inkscape.

Here's the schema of the board above in svg format so you can easily edit it to match your board 😀

(We also plan to let all of these files be available for anyone in a way or another, just wait 😁 )

Here is my prelim IH4077C docs in varied formats, still have some work to do on them but good enough for me for now 😀

kdr wrote on 2020-10-17, 09:53:

(from the EGA thread) #17 Manufacturer/Identifier: NEL ELECTRONICS / "ULTIMATE EGA+++" Chipset: "UDL" C3 (8737KK) BIOS-String: N […]
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(from the EGA thread) #17
Manufacturer/Identifier: NEL ELECTRONICS / "ULTIMATE EGA+++"
Chipset: "UDL" C3 (8737KK)
BIOS-String: NEL INTERNATIONAL 1987 IBM EGA COMPATIBLE SMART BIOS 5.93 11/17/87
Status: working in XT systems at 4.77Mhz and 8Mhz, display corruption at 10Mhz

[...]

Writes to display RAM are fine, but reads often fail to return valid data = corruption when scrolling etc. I suspect it's actually the ASIC that can't keep up with the 10Mhz bus.

I share your impression that it's likely due to the ASIC and not to the RAM. The RAM timing on MDA, CGA and EGA cards is solely derived from the pixel clock and independent of the bus clock. The ASIC needs to pull IOCHRDY low until the RAM returned valid data on reads. The RAM access on MDA/CGA/EGA/standard VGA so is so slow that the card should use IOCHRDY on basically every memory cycle. It seems that the card releases IOCHRDY a little bit too early, so that the 10MHz system reads the data from the bus when it's not quite there.

Does your 10MHz XT support adding a wait state to ISA cycles at 10MHz? In this case, you might want to try that. On the other hand, if it just adds a default wait state and the card adds extra wait states using IOCHRDY already, it might not help.

mkarcher wrote on 2020-10-17, 11:27:

Does your 10MHz XT support adding a wait state to ISA cycles at 10MHz? In this case, you might want to try that. On the other hand, if it just adds a default wait state and the card adds extra wait states using IOCHRDY already, it might not help.

It does not. I'm not even sure if it does add any wait states. I have a cheap logic analyzer on the way which should help answer that question.

But in the case of the ERGO480 and SPEGASYNC cards, it's absolutely the RAM speed that prevents the card from working at 10Mhz. The SPEGASYNC has 120ns RAM and only works reliably at 8Mhz, while the ERGO480 has 100ns RAM and it works reliably at 10Mhz. I even did some crazy stuff like swapping the EGA chips and the custom gate array between the two cards, since they're nominally the same chips on both cards. (The RAM, alas, is not socketed.) While I agree that the ISA bus speed *shouldn't* have an effect, given that the sequencer which controls the video RAM timing is clocked by the video dot clock, some aspect of the memory read/write timing is influenced by what speed the ISA bus is running at.