Have a few old Compaq boards from about the same era and they are very OEM specific. Not just the BIOS but the boards themself are made to Compaq specs (one requires a straight floppy cable, not one with a twist like standard as an example) so electrically very different from most retail boards. Trying a different "generic" BIOS most likely will brick the board from which there will be no way to fix. Just my opinion based on owning a couple.
If you can post some good pictures of your board it might help as a few Compaq's did use name brand boards but that was very rare....

I included an image of the mobo from a replacement parts site. If you need more specific photos, I guess I'll take it out of the case (which is a pain, dumb OEM cases).

Nope that picture shows me exactly what I expected. There is no generic BIOS you will find for it. Reasons right off the bat: On-board Rage video, onboard audio and an unidentified support chip -- all circled in red. All would require support in the BIOS. Here is couple picture of different boards with same MVP3 chipset (which are very good SS7 board) to compare, note the difference in chips. There may be a non-Compaq board out there with similar components but doubt you could use their bios.
FIC 503+ https://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTA2MVgxNDM5/z/YK4 … t_id=880000500F
MSI MS-5184 https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/MS5184

Damn you Compaq and your crappy OEM parts. Thanks anyways!

brian105 wrote on 2020-04-20, 02:15:

Damn you Compaq and your crappy OEM parts. Thanks anyways!

It's not exclusive to Compaq, most big brands (IBM, HP, Compaq, Lenovo, Dell) do the same, they build their PCs with custom OEM parts.

Yeah, it's a shame that parts of any generation have so many variations. I suppose the best I can do is put a graphics card in (which they even botched by not putting AGP slots, but ISA and PCI) and bump the RAM up a bit to compensate for no overclocking. K6-2+ and K6-3 CPUs look expensive on eBay, so that's a no-go. Though I suppose most games of the era (1997-9) should run fine on 450mhz.
I've had an idea, though. I know many BIOSes can be "unlocked"; that is, it is functionally the same BIOS but a few extra menus are unlocked. I've flashed an unlocked BIOS on my much more modern Dell Vostro 200, so maybe that's a possibility with a version of PhoenixBIOS this old.

brian105 wrote on 2020-04-20, 02:27:

I've had an idea, though. I know many BIOSes can be "unlocked"; that is, it is functionally the same BIOS but a few extra menus are unlocked. I've flashed an unlocked BIOS on my much more modern Dell Vostro 200, so maybe that's a possibility with a version of PhoenixBIOS this old.

Yes it may be possible with some of the old Phoenix tools. Phoenix BIOS are hard to crack since Intel made sure to take down their's and any other good Phoenix bios editors out there years ago.. but you may get lucky.

The Compaq OEM appears to be Mitac, model Typhoon 52-M9

Not that'll likely help, but the latest Compaq ROMPaq bios appears to be v2.38 Rev A from November 1999

Mild issue: Any BIOS flashers I try in DOS require to turn off EMM386, which I can't do because it says EMS is in use. I guess I'll have to dig up a floppy disk somewhere to put the flashers onto and turn off EMM386 while booted on them.

Have you tried the overclock by adjusting the jumpers on the motherboard?

https://web.archive.org/web/19991105210720/ht … 5000/bdjum.html

JP1 for the CPU clock & JP3 for the CPU core voltage

https://web.archive.org/web/19991104152845/ht … 0jmpr.html#DIMM

This worked for someone with a Presario 5360

I did it !!!!! I acheived 500 MHz by upping the multiplier to 5, and I upped the vcore from 2.4 to 2.7. At 2.4@500MHz, it couldn'T post, at 2.5, had a keyboard error, at 2.6, once the windows logo passed, it restarted, and at 2.7, it entered windows, with some errors. I am currently writing this post at 500 MHz, donno the temps, but I touched the heatsink, and seemed pretty hot for me (but I can't compare, I didn't touch it before the overclock, plus it's with the compaq factory HSF). I've done my FIRST OVERCLOCK !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is it normal that some programs produce errors while loading windows ? like vshine, something like that, I am not sure of the name !

And I tried to test the "new" PC with 3D Mark 99 (I have 64 MB of ram, but the system uses 4 MB for shared memory that I don't even use (old video card), and 2MB are lost for donno-what !), and it got me back to the desktop. Does this mean the processor is too hot, or that it doesn't have enough power ?

Ooh, that's promising. I was having problems with even dumping the BIOS because of EMM386, but this needs no special equipment provided the jumpers are also on my motherboard. I'll be sure to try that, thanks.