That looks very familiar to me. I might have this and the manual, but no GAL or ROM.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2026-02-05, 15:27:

That looks very familiar to me. I might have this and the manual, but no GAL or ROM.

oh! if you have the manual please post a photo of the jumper settings 😁

OK, I posted the ROM --
https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=2277
https://theretroweb.com/chips/7894

I have the v1.1 of the card without the ROM or the GAL. I'll have to try it out once I find a GAL chip.

I put the picture of your card next to mine on the retroweb because I couldn't see any differences between the v1.0 and v1.1 boards, other than your VT83C461 chip seemed to use a different packaging machine and is 30 weeks older. Both are on the good side of the 512MB limit though.

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/ares … sion-av150-v1-1

Edit -- The ROM looks like it is there to help with booting for drives > 512MB. Not really clear that it does anything to enable faster transfer speeds like the DOS drivers do.

douglar wrote on 2026-02-06, 01:42:

OK, I posted the ROM --[...]

excellent thanks!
now if we also get the jumper settings the easy way it will be great 😁
also if that optional BIOS is just used to boot drives more than 512mb then using XTIDE BIOS instead would be the best solution... I will test all that once I pull a VLB system out of storage

You should read the manual. It explains the flash setup and what the differences are between v1.0 and v1.1. It seems like v1.1 is quite capable. I also have the driver floppy. I think we might want to find the v1.1 flash image. I think there is one in a driver package somewhere.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2026-02-07, 21:19:

You should read the manual. It explains the flash setup and what the differences are between v1.0 and v1.1. It seems like v1.1 is quite capable. I also have the driver floppy. I think we might want to find the v1.1 flash image. I think there is one in a driver package somewhere.

The attachment av150.jpg is no longer available

The attachment av150_manual.pdf is no longer available

thanks for this!
it does seem the card is quite capable, I like the part where you manually enter the 8-8-8 parameteres for hdd so that the card can activate LBA when it has no rom installed
but this also made me think, on my cards the rom chip is just a normal 27C256 without any means to save any settings to it... so how could you save the hdd settings is the rom is not writeable? the whole special "bios" of the card with the speed settings etc is kinda useless in this case?

the only difference between 1.0 and 1.1 revisions I found is related to IDE2 IRQ (maybe I missed something?)
if you have the means please also upload the driver disk - for archival reasons

btw the bios on my card is v1.1 - whereas the actual card hardware revision is 1.0
when I dumped the rom it was probably wrong to name the file according to the card's hw version...

edit:
I think I found the package with the rom image you mention: https://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid= … 040&menustate=0
the version of this bios is 1.05 - and it is 8kb in size
my 1.1 bios is 16kb in size
it makes me wonder if the manual was written with this 8kb bios in size that could be used with an 28C64 style eeprom that could be written from the card itself

Often the 8k rom is just written twice into a 16kb rom. Or it could use the second 8k for storing values?

If you have the GAL chip to do the address decoding and to assert CE,WE, OE as needed, what else do you need to write to a 28c128 or 28c256 eeprom?

I am not sure what the deal is with the bios revisions... But I have checked my dump - the ROM data is 16kb (doubled to fill the 32kb chip)

douglar wrote on 2026-02-08, 21:22:

Often the 8k rom is just written twice into a 16kb rom. Or it could use the second 8k for storing values?

If you have the GAL chip to do the address decoding and to assert CE,WE, OE as needed, what else do you need to write to a 28c128 or 28c256 eeprom?

The most important point about (most) 28 series EEPROM is you need to provide 12V programming voltage to a certain pin during programming only, which essentially requires a software-controlled switch that can provide 12V. I'd expect you would realize something like that using a dedicated transistor, but I didn't see anything like that on the board photo. This would likely mean a flashable EEPROM wouldn't be a 28 series chip, but a 29 series chip. 29 series chip are "5V only" and can be reprogrammed using /CE, /WE and /OE only.

mkarcher wrote on 2026-02-08, 22:50:

douglar wrote on 2026-02-08, 21:22:

Often the 8k rom is just written twice into a 16kb rom. Or it could use the second 8k for storing values?

If you have the GAL chip to do the address decoding and to assert CE,WE, OE as needed, what else do you need to write to a 28c128 or 28c256 eeprom?

The most important point about (most) 28 series EEPROM is you need to provide 12V programming voltage to a certain pin during programming only, which essentially requires a software-controlled switch that can provide 12V. I'd expect you would realize something like that using a dedicated transistor, but I didn't see anything like that on the board photo. This would likely mean a flashable EEPROM wouldn't be a 28 series chip, but a 29 series chip. 29 series chip are "5V only" and can be reprogrammed using /CE, /WE and /OE only.

I figured a 28 series chip would make more sense because it does byte writes. Was not aware that 28 series chip required 12v for byte writes. Can you provide a reference for that?

douglar wrote on 2026-02-09, 00:21:

I figured a 28 series chip would make more sense because it does byte writes. Was not aware that 28 series chip required 12v for byte writes. Can you provide a reference for that?

Obviously, you are correct: Not all 28 series chips require +12V. The Atmel/Microchip AT28c64 does not, the same is true for the ST M28c64. The same is true for the AT28c256. They provide single-byte writes and can combine them inside a page of 64 bytes. They don't need erasing before updating, even if you clear bits. These are the 28 series chips you were thinking of.

The AT29c256 is quite similar, but not identical. The AT29c256 always writes a whole page of 64 bytes, writing indeterminate values to page bytes you don't explicitly set. The W29EE011 is a 1-MBit chip that has page writes like the AT29c256 (no chip erase required). These are 29 series chips that can be used for configuration storage as well, as page-wide erase sizes are easy to deal with in software. Those are the 29 series chips I was thinking of.

On the other hand, there are chips like the Intel 28F001, which has erase blocks like a typical flash chip (112KB main, 2*4KB parameters, 8 KB boot block) and requires +12V, while similarly named chips like the AM29F010 do not require 12V.

So, for smaller chips (below 1MBit), it seems you are correct that they do not require +12V, and only this class of chips is relevant for this card. On the other hand, there are 29 series chips that could be used for this purpose as well. And finally, there is the W27E257 with a 27 series designator, which is programmed byte-wise while providinig an electric chip erase, but requires 12V. While this chip is clearly named differently than a 27c256 series UV-erasable EPROM (E instead of C, 257 instead of 256), the next size up is called W27C512, but is still electrically erasable. I'm sorry for the misinformation, and no, I'm not an LLM. 😀

mkarcher wrote on 2026-02-09, 07:28:

So, for smaller chips (below 1MBit), it seems you are correct that they do not require +12V, and only this class of chips is relevant for this card. On the other hand, there are 29 series chips that could be used for this purpose as well. And finally, there is the W27E257 with a 27 series designator, which is programmed byte-wise while providinig an electric chip erase, but requires 12V. While this chip is clearly named differently than a 27c256 series UV-erasable EPROM (E instead of C, 257 instead of 256), the next size up is called W27C512, but is still electrically erasable. I'm sorry for the misinformation, and no, I'm not an LLM. 😀

Thanks for the detailed response. My eeprom knowledge is just enough to get done what I need to get done and not much more, so it's always nice to get the bigger picture.

I got my GAL on order and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do with my AV150 ver1.1 board.

Here is the driver disk for the av150 1.1. It is a VIAIDE driver disk version 4.09 for the VT82C496G dated 96/11/05, providing supporting drivers for Win3.x, Win95, WinNT 3.1, WinNT 3.5, Netware 3.11/4.0x, SCO UNIX, OS2, and MS-DOS. It appears to be a later version of the driver than is currently found on retroweb for this card.

I created an image using the dd program and zipped it from a HD 3.25" floppy supplied with the av150.

Sorry if I inadvertently caused confusion, but I labeled the driver bundles I collected based on the dos driver version, because that's what I was tracking at the time, and not all bundles from all vendors had a handy release version like this bundle. This bundle is the same one that I posted to Vogonsdrivers and theretroweb.

1		 -------------------------------------
2		     Latest Released Version (4.09)
3		 -------------------------------------
4		       INSTALL.EXE      3.05
5		       DOS              4.02
6		       WINDOWS          4.02
7		       OS2              4.01
8		       NETWARE          4.01
9		       NT31             3.20
10		       NT35             3.20
11		       UNIX             4.01
12		       WIN95            1.01

The release.lst file in the bundle lists all past versions and what changed in each. Rare to get that level of detail.