Scraphoarder wrote on 2024-05-07, 16:59:

Thanks and nice to see someone else also made progress on making theese boards usable. Maybe i will try to dig up one of mine that also have two unresponsive ram slots and flash your BIOS.

I don't think the issue with RAM slots could be fixed from the BIOS side. The RAM slot problem was more likely hardware. My BIOS files only added additional microcodes needed for proper support of 45nm CPUs as well as updated all of them to the latest available version.

The 008 version of BIOS apparently had a few additional options in the ACPI part that were not present in 009 version, though it was not too important to me. It's advised to use the same BIOS version as the one your board has, as flashing the other version requires a few extra options to "force" it.

I did not actually fix the ISA DMA problem on the BIOS side. I simply found out the cause of it and that can be easily corrected using programs that could manipulate PCI registers.

Its inability to fully utilize quad-core CPU was likely due to its ACPI tables declaring only two CPU entries compared to four in the ACPI tables from ASRock 865 boards. I just don't know which is the correct way to edit and rebuild ACPI tables for old AMI BIOSes...

It seems the 1.0s1.2 (865G with real AGP slot) version is becoming harder to find around my place... while 865GV, which 1.0s1.3 uses, is rather unfit for use with a discrete PCI video card, due to its onboard video cannot be disabled. The respective register controlling whether or not to enable the onboard video is read-only in 865GV, while read-write in 865G. As such, if using a discrete PCI video card, both the onboard and discrete video would be active in the OS which may lead to problems if you're not actively using the onboard video.

Was a little unclear what i wanted to do, but i was thinking to try tinkering with the board with bad ram slots if something went poop with flashing modded BIOS. I have two other thats ok. All my three boards are v1.0S1.2, but since i wasnt eager and able to fork out $275 for a russian BIOSmod with some software i put them all in storage waiting for better times.