VOGONS


First post, by zapbuzz

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I'd like to show off my refurbished apollo Motherboard ABIT VP6.
All capacitors replaced. This sucker cost mega.
I've always wanted one because the BIOS data can be dismantled and rebuilt easily and no onboard scrap audio or outdated LAN.
ABit VP6 DUAL Pentium 3 Motherboard + 2x Intel P3 800EB CPU + 2GB PC-133 ECC RAM (RAM not shown) 1000 watt PSU.
I have a gigabit LAN card not shown in picture and 8 channel audio .
Although it has USB1 i use ps2 mouse and keyboard to free up irq's and have disabled printer and com ports.
Yes I'm adding USB2 pci it has 4 on the rear and one internaland its a VIA Chip controller.
Also I have a 8 port ATA133 pci RAID card and am looking to populate 4 x 2 motherboard - ATA100 and 8 x 2 RAID - ATA133
ati 128mb AGP 4X - 8X GPU (4X mode typically for this model)
I have researched and found these and simular do not last long if cpu's over 1 ghz are used so I am sticking with above mentioned.
There is an wise old saying "The brighter the light; the quicker it will burn out"
Got heaps of potentual here even with windows 10 x86.
The reason for this little project of mine is to have legacy support of as many operating systems and have some power to keep up with
user demand. Also that meltdown and spectre problem doesn't have much influence here.

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  • usb2.jpg
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    usb2.jpg
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    File comment
    A suspiciously slow USB2 is it suppressing faster available speeds messages?
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    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • sc.jpg
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    sc.jpg
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    1645 views
    File comment
    A good card for 2000 XP supports front panel cards.
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    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • s-l1600.jpg
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    s-l1600.jpg
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    1661 views
    File comment
    Notice the different sizes for CPU heatsinks. They have been replaced now with golden orbs.
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Last edited by zapbuzz on 2021-07-18, 04:08. Edited 10 times in total.

Reply 3 of 14, by appiah4

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Well, yeah.. but the ABIT VP6 is an Apollo Pro 133A motherboard, a completely different and a vastly more capable and stable chipset, it's more comparable to the 440BX or even 815E I think..

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 6 of 14, by zapbuzz

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The RAID card and Mothrboard are rare to get and I am now running an unofficial BIOS with the RAID controller's last bios update code.
Gigabit LAN is fun but windows 9x drivers make it overheat so its 100mbit only unless its an NT O.S.
I also like to play synthesizer and MIDI will sound good on windows xp with Yamaha YXG50
I will have to use soundfonts n stuff on linux but I will be happy with XP.

Last edited by zapbuzz on 2021-05-13, 02:36. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 7 of 14, by zapbuzz

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2gb PC133 DIMM one printed side ram for games. (LOWEST LATENCY)
Settled on windows xp pro. Best for Soundblaster support with a soundfont loader app.
Did have a SATA SSD but I don't think it even needs it as much as a P4 i have ready to run.
Found a 13 year old, new old stock ATX beige tower.
Gots my IBM CRT, Mirosoft light mouse and a keyboard all in beige.
Its a real "beigeiful" machine just the way i wanted it when it was too expensive new.

Reply 8 of 14, by zapbuzz

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Not finished but working like new.
Installing stuff today then zip ties and ribbon cable tucking.
The GPU is aN ATI 128mb 8x AGP runs ok in AGP 2X mode motherboard does support 4x sideband.
Photo is not recent but its the same unit looking like it did 🤣

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  • IMG_20140101_110101.jpg
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Reply 9 of 14, by PcBytes

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You got a VT6202 PCI card to work on one of these? I have one and at least three mobos (Soyo 6BA+IV 440BX, Luckytech P5MVP3 and Acorp 6VIA81P) refused to even POST with it inserted.

"Enter at your own peril, past the bolted door..."
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98SE : P3 650, Soyo SY-6BA+IV, 384MB RAM, 80GB

Reply 10 of 14, by zapbuzz

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PcBytes wrote on 2021-05-13, 07:19:

You got a VT6202 PCI card to work on one of these? I have one and at least three mobos (Soyo 6BA+IV 440BX, Luckytech P5MVP3 and Acorp 6VIA81P) refused to even POST with it inserted.

works flawlessly my favourite use is in windows xp for usb flash drives. Plug and play was faultless. I can only guess your issue would be the resource allocation of existing usb ports of your system and maybe you could re allocate them through your system bios? 2 ways i can think of is disabled built in ones or reassign IRQ? if too few IRQ exists perhaps disabling priner/serial ports to use their allocations (if possible)
If your card is second hand maybe its logic is scrambled if you didn't find a system that can use it?
I suspect it isn't running at top speed however and isn't true USB2 but at least my usb3 burner can access it ok.
Going right off the deepend here I will dare say I have recapped and replacesd all MOSFETS on my motherboard. (The old monitor is next)
Such an effort I would only do for the sake of the brand new 1ghz pentiums I got for it.
Many old motherboards run heaps better with that work done but it not cheap and better done by thy self due to economy.

Last edited by zapbuzz on 2021-07-18, 03:56. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 11 of 14, by zapbuzz

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The idiot days of modding the vp6 bios and mobo to run Tualatins usually killed the chipset within 2 years.
Onboard menu does all the coppermine P3 overclocking supported but I don't go there because its 5 years max life (in general for all O.C. Stuff.)
Need to find the correct bios modding tools of 1998 - 2000 to repack it with latest RAID bios the official one was not updated prior to abit going out of buisness so I am kind of frutrated the latest drivers are incompatable.
I got a PCI slot RAID running RAID 0 until I can run the system RAID controller again and thankfully it supports booting but i had to reassign the built in IDE controller to a random address of IRQ15 to allow the pci card to take its resources or it wouldn't work at post.
Now has Creative SB this has front panel audio support so the tower has front panel AC97 headphone support sounds good has soundfont loader app bundled been playing my synthesizer thru midi on it. (Usually pentium 4 systems in general do front panel audio but this board no built in audio)
I am totally convinced if SATA RAID came out when this motherboard was in vogue it would had discouraged mobo modding that although i don't boot it on SATA i have a 4 port SATA running raid 0 on 4 disks in windows management i just had the spare disks sitting on the shelf got sick of looking at them. Makes loading games like original WoW snappy.
This is a just a casual use system I know there is just about none left in existance. A true dual cpu experience not designed for just buisness or server work.
When I cannot get non ECC ram I can actually use server ram theres tons of those around. (BIOS doesn't support it but chipset still happy to run)

Reply 12 of 14, by DosFreak

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I haven't used my VP6 mobo since 2003 (still in the closet) but here is the VP6 YT BIOS modded with v2.34.
Award BIOS Editor may work. Last version in my VP6 folder is 1.0 but I don't know if I ever used it with my VP6 BIOS or not.
Also cbrom 2.07

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  • Filename
    VP6_YT_234.zip
    File size
    315.54 KiB
    Downloads
    47 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

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Reply 13 of 14, by zapbuzz

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DosFreak wrote on 2021-07-06, 03:06:

I haven't used my VP6 mobo since 2003 (still in the closet) but here is the VP6 YT BIOS modded with v2.34.
Award BIOS Editor may work. Last version in my VP6 folder is 1.0 but I don't know if I ever used it with my VP6 BIOS or not.
Also cbrom 2.07

I'll use that to make an unofficial update.
I am attaching the final bios revision loader released in 2007 I will find out if it patches the bios permanently or if its just like a TSR or something.
the last 2 revisions are interesting especially the PCI
Here is the highpoint BIOS software revision history:

Revision History
====================
v2.352 01/26/2007 (got it)
* Support Vista

v2.351 01/05/2004 (could be the required driverpacks version for 2000 and xp will confirm)
* Add "use private stack" option in BIOS (to fix DOS6.22 booting fail)
* Fix 66M PCI support

v2.35 08/04/2003
* Add 302/302N support

v2.345 05/09/2003
* Fix compatibility issue with Intel SATA RAID BIOS
* Fix Windows "LDM configuration disk write error"

v2.344 04/11/2003
* Fix clock calculation
* Fix driver compatibility issue on SOYO SY-P4IP mainboard

v2.342 03/24/2003
* Fix HPT370A timing
* Add RAID 1.5 support

v2.34 10/17/2002
* Add HPT372N controller support
* Fix hptpro.sys compatibility issue with NIS2003 on FAT partition

v2.33 09/17/2002
* Fix 48bit LBA compatibility
* Add RocketMate support

v2.32 07/01/2002
* Fix 48bit LBA formatting issue
* Fix hptpro.sys problem on Windows XP system restore and sparse files
* use PMM to allocate BIOS memory
* Disable BIOS EBDA reallocation by default

v2.31 01/09/2002
* Performance improved
* Fix BIOS compatibility issue with Adaptec SCSI
* Fix Seagate Barracuda III and IV mode to ATA100
* Show capacity by 1G=1,000,000,000 Bytes
* Fix BIOS bug "drive capacity incorrect after deleting a broken array"

v2.3 12/20/2001
* Add support for stripe size 128K-2M
* Support multi controller
* Modify driver for HPT370/370A compatibility
* Fix reading ATA/133 disk error when PCI clock is lower than 33MHz
* Fix compatibility problem with Intel IAA driver under Windows ME
* Fix BIOS compatibility issue with MSI845 mainboard

v2.2 12/08/2001

* Performance improved
* Fix GUI re-open bug when rebuilding an array

v2.1 11/15/2001

* Add 48bit LBA (Big Drive) support
* Fix BIOS display problem on S3 display adapter
* Fix BIOS BBS support
* Fix Windows ME hibernating problem

Attachments

  • Filename
    hpt3xx-bios-2352-0617.7z
    File size
    71.79 KiB
    Downloads
    49 downloads
    File comment
    this is virus free and is correct part for curious owners of Abit VP6 to run with DRIVERPACK drivers (latest)
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
Last edited by zapbuzz on 2021-07-18, 03:57. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 14 of 14, by amijim

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Goodmonring Vogons , i am reviving my Abit VP6 and i would like to ask you how can i have this latest bios.Has anyone managed to get a bin file.i am currently on 2.351 yt ,thank you .

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