VOGONS


First post, by mdog69

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I have a Dell 486/P.
The motherboard matches that shown at http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/m/C-D/30940.htm
and the links are more accurately described here: http://ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/PS2_MOST/ACROR … ELL/2006005.PDF

The board has 4x 72pin SIMM slots, which will accept 1, 4 or 16Mb with parity.
The problem is that I only have 4Mb and 8Mb parity SIMMs. The 8Mb SIMMs get recognised as 4Mb, so I'm stuck with 16Mb.
I do have some 16k FPM non-parity SIMMs, but these are either ignored, or give a memory error.

The BIOS setup is a two page "dumbed down" menu with no way of disabling RAM parity.
The Phoenix motherboard BIOS is version "1.10 A09", and lives on a soldered in 28F001 flash device (rather than in a EPROM socket which would make life easier).
The setup menu is a two page "dumbed down" menu with no option to disable RAM parity.
It also has an XTIDE ROM installed in a 3C509 card to get around the 504/528Mb disk limit.

The only other information I have is as follows:
1) JP5 has the following functions (not as documented via the link above)

                                        Closed  Open
VIRQ VGA Interrupt None IRQ9*
RSET Reset for factory diag On Off *
MOCO Mono/Colour Colour* Mono
MNT Resrved manuf maint On Off*
EPWD Password on/off On* Off
MIRQ Mouse enable/IRQ IRQ12* Off
NIDE New/old IDE drive New* Old
OIDE New/old IDE drive Old New*
NWAT Normal ISA cycles Normal* 1xWait State
ATRM ISA Exp bus boot Enable Disable*
* = current setting

Does anyone know if this board can be knobbled into accepting non-parity RAM, either by some undocumented hardware hack, updating the motherboard BIOS, or at a pinch, shoehorning a kludge into my XTIDE EPROM?

/mdog69

edit stason link replaced with uncreativelabs