WJG6260 wrote on 2023-02-20, 23:28:

I recently acquired this FIC 486 VE-V motherboard, without its BIOS. It physically appears to be in nice shape; nothing is reall […]
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I recently acquired this FIC 486 VE-V motherboard, without its BIOS. It physically appears to be in nice shape; nothing is really per se wrong with it except for the missing BIOS. Attached is a photo from the seller. Does anyone here have one of these?

s-l1600.jpg

I'd appreciate any and all help! I've tried looking just about everywhere, including elhvb and TRW, neither of which have any leads. It's almost like this board doesn't exist.

I asked someone who sold another approximately 3-4 months ago, but they did not dump the BIOS before their sale, unfortunately.

I think there's both an Award and an AMI BIOS available. I'm amenable to either.

Thanks in advance 😀

The crystal oscillator is missing, too 😉

Good catch! I keep a bunch on hand, so I put a few aside. I’m looking to see if this board can do 40MHz+ FSB, ideally even 50MHz or 60/66MHz.

There was one of those new old stock on eBay last summer but I passed on it...
Maybe this enthusiast would dump the BIOS for you since they like the board enough to make a web page about it? http://www.pcang.com/mainboard_fic.htm

Oh awesome! Thank you for this. I’ll reach out and see what they say. It seems like their site is still active and was recently updated too-all good signs so far!

EDIT: Weirdly, there doesn't seem to be any contact information on this site. It's too bad, because this person has a really nice collection. Do you or anyone familiar with it have any ideas?

You can find the EISA config files and tools here:

https://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/Fic/bi … ards/utilities/

I own one myself and can dump the BIOS but I hve to dig it out in the basement first if noone here has it at hand.

Did you run any tests on this board? I’m curious about the memory performance.

majestyk wrote on 2023-02-21, 06:49:

You can find the EISA config files and tools here:

https://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/archive/Fic/bi … ards/utilities/

I own one myself and can dump the BIOS but I hve to dig it out in the basement first if noone here has it at hand.

Awesome! Thank you for this. I went ahead and saved everything, just for when I get the BIOS in hand.

I hope one turns up and someone has this board on hand, but if not I would really appreciate a dump of the BIOS! Either way, thanks again!

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-02-21, 12:22:

Did you run any tests on this board? I’m curious about the memory performance.

I am as well. I wonder if the Symphony-based design really means much or if it’s just in line with other VIA 486 chipsets (which isn’t particularly bad, but Symphony’s design principles would be interesting if truly applied here based on their other chipsets’ performance characteristics).

I have here a FIC 486VE, it is really NOS, never in use.

I take soon him...and dump ROM

Madao wrote on 2023-02-21, 16:04:

I have here a FIC 486VE, it is really NOS, never in use.

I took soon him...and dump ROM

That would be wonderful! Brilliant, thank you!

Really interested to see how this board is.

Re: 80486 BIOS image collection

Pleas click on this URL , i have attached ROM dump

______________________________________

Thank you Madao! This is great news!

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-02-21, 12:22:

Did you run any tests on this board? I’m curious about the memory performance.

I presume it's an older design and doesn't support write-back L1 or anything like that given the looks of it?

In the DIP cache area, it looks like it can take both "normal" skinny DIP cache chips as well as full sized ones perhaps?

Now I wish I had snagged that one off eBay, but I have too much hardware piling up.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2023-02-21, 23:55:

I presume it's an older design and doesn't support write-back L1 or anything like that given the looks of it? […]
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Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-02-21, 12:22:

Did you run any tests on this board? I’m curious about the memory performance.

I presume it's an older design and doesn't support write-back L1 or anything like that given the looks of it?

In the DIP cache area, it looks like it can take both "normal" skinny DIP cache chips as well as full sized ones perhaps?

Now I wish I had snagged that one off eBay, but I have too much hardware piling up.

L1 write-back is probably out of the question, but the Nice SuperEISA (SiS 406/411-based) is plenty fast without it. I noticed in pshipkov's thread that he managed to enable L1 WB on a Symphony Haydn II board, which is interesting as the Haydn II doesn't, as far as I am aware, officially support L1 WB. I wonder if the same applies to other boards?

The slightly older SiS406/411 supports L2 write-back, so I suspect this board should do the same. The BIOS doesn't seem to have any options either way to that end, however. It might be like the OPTi 82C682 chipset, which only operates in L2 write-back mode.

It should take both skinny and 400 mil cache chips. The SuperEISA is the same there.

I've been struggling to get this board to do two things: (i) it does not like 80MHz oscillators, and seems to run an Am5x86 at 53MHz instead of 160MHz when one such crystal is inserted and (ii) it does not like 1024k cache in various configurations, despite being silkscreened to that effect. It hangs on POST at A4, which has to do with cache wait states.

EDIT: Oh, and I've noticed that all boards with an AMI 6/6/92-based BIOS seem to dislike the ELSA Winner 1000ISA, an S3 805i-based ISA card. It works fine on later boards with newer BIOSes. Strange stuff...

Check the pins on the cache sockets. On my Tyan S1437, the two extra rows of pins on the skinny side of the cache socket were not wired up. I was able to fix this by bridging them to the pins on the wide part of the socket. I suppose it was done this way as at the time of manufacture 32-pin skinny cache chips did not yet exist.

Thanks for the tip! I tinkered with it some more and got things going. I had to set System BIOS Cacheable to disabled, and then it booted just fine and recognized all 1024k of L2. It’s weird to me that it will only boot with System BIOS Cacheable set as disabled and yet 0ws on cache and DRAM is fine.

This board is just truthfully quite weird overall. It’s very picky about SIMMs and can support 64MB of RAM (based on the EISA CFG) but only in the form of 4x16MB SIMMs. I tried such a configuration and it hung, even using a few different sets of SIMMs. 128MB seems to be a no-go. I have it temporarily running with 4x4MB.

It seems decently quick, but the main memory speed is low, in the ~23 MB/s range with an Am5x86-133. That doesn’t fare well for higher-speed operation. I can’t get 160MHz going, and don’t have a 100MHz oscillator for 150MHz operation. I should probably get some of those. It won’t boot with a 40MHz or 50MHz oscillator jumpered to 1x clk.

I’m really confused why the board freaks out at 40MHz. It should work just fine, but instead I get 53MHz on the Am5x86 and everything is slow. Weird.

It does work with a Pentium Overdrive, which is kind of interesting. It seems decently fast overall, but I haven’t really had the time to play with it much. I plan on doing some real testing and reporting back.

Oh, and SCSI is a nightmare on this board. It does not like the AHA-154x series of cards, nor does it like an AHA-2840/2A. I should try an AHA-152x, but got it going via IDE for now.

WJG6260 wrote on 2023-02-22, 01:59:

I’m really confused why the board freaks out at 40MHz. It should work just fine, but instead I get 53MHz on the Am5x86 and everything is slow. Weird.

Wasn't 40 MHz operation for a 486 only introduced by AMD therefore when this board was made, only 25, 33 and 50 were contemplated? Not sure if that's any explanation for it not working though.

EISA was basically dead before writeback 486s came around. I'm not aware of any that specifically support those CPUs. The closest is probably the late revision A.I.R. 486EI, but that only supported the DX4 in write-through mode. There also exists the OPTi "Hunter" EISA chipset, that supports both 486 and P5. It seems to have the writeback L1 support for the P5 CPUs, and *possibly* POD83 which I have not tried. Unfortunately, I don't own the 486 CPU card for my J3 board, so I can't test to see if writeback 486 CPUs work or not.

Cyrix had their writeback 486s in out 1993. Has anyone ever seen mention of the "486S" in their user manual?

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2023-02-22, 04:37:

EISA was basically dead before writeback 486s came around. I'm not aware of any that specifically support those CPUs. The closest is probably the late revision A.I.R. 486EI, but that only supported the DX4 in write-through mode. There also exists the OPTi "Hunter" EISA chipset, that supports both 486 and P5. It seems to have the writeback L1 support for the P5 CPUs, and *possibly* POD83 which I have not tried. Unfortunately, I don't own the 486 CPU card for my J3 board, so I can't test to see if writeback 486 CPUs work or not.

Cyrix had their writeback 486s in out 1993. Has anyone ever seen mention of the "486S" in their user manual?

This manual mentions it on page 6 (https://archive.org/details/efa-4mhl3s-4dmuhl … up?view=theater) but just throws it in with a 486SX as I don't think the UM491 chipset supports L1 write back in any form regardless.

I figured that with EISA, that it made no sense to re-engineer a board to support write back CPUs (or 3.3V support). I noticed the OP's has 1994 date codes so I guess they just kept on building the old design as long as people wanted an EISA board for any reason. I notice unlike other 486 boards, this one must have been too old a design to ever make it onto fic.com.tw and it therefore didn't make it to archive.org either.

Before 1996, most support was on BBS or FTP servers. 1995-96 is when a lot of companies started putting more efforts into their website. It also didn't help that a lot of the established players had already gone backrupt by 1996. A lot of documentation is probably lost forever.