Hi Jan,

happy to report the CT-5SIM patch J.3 works great!

Performance:

Both SSDs were measured only as second drive in Windows 98 SE.
With the Samsung SSD no access was possible under pure DOS with "Sector not found" errors.
Not sure if that was caused by the JMicron Sata to IDE bridge.

As side note IDE BURST MODE needs to be enabled in BIOS. Otherwise DMA speeds are below of non-DMA speeds.

Again, great work!

analog_programmer wrote on 2023-12-31, 15:40:

I'll gladly test your newer patched BIOS version for Shuttle HOT-596A board when it's ready.

Hi analog_programmer,

The new HOT-569A patch J.3 BIOS version is ready and I sent you a download link via PM.
Please let us know how this new BIOS works.

P.S. Some stupid question: If your HDD volume compatibility BIOS patches are almost the same as the ones applied by the BIOS Patcher software, why BIOS Patcher applies its HDD-patches over already manually patched by you BIOSes? I've never used such HDD-volume double patched BIOSes, just tried what more will be autopatched (mostly for adding support for more CPUs) and noticed this strange BIOS Patcher behavior.

My BIOS patching method involves making a good disassembly listing of the BIOS, then analyze what needs to be changed. Then I edit the BIOS firmware directly in machine code with a hexeditor, followed by another run through the disassembler to check the result, and to see if I got it right. This method is indeed quite time consuming but works on both compressed and uncompressed BIOSes and allows me to catch unique bugs.

The BIOS patcher tool from apple_rom works by adding compressed modules with the patches to the compressed BIOS image. The patches are then applied in Shadow RAM during each boot-up. A quite clever approach for compressed BIOSes and this usually works well. But there have been several cases where it bricked a system, but luckily the developer(s) have put in a fall-back feature that allows you to boot with the original BIOS. Just hold down the “–“ (minus) key on the numeric keypad during boot and the patches are not applied.

Now when you run the BIOS Patcher tool on one of my patched BIOSes, the program may not recognize the bug because I changed the original code.
Then the tool will either not apply that particular patch, or tries to patch my patch. The later can result in unpredictable behaviour.

Regards, Jan

Chkcpu wrote on 2024-01-26, 16:28:

Hi analog_programmer,

The new HOT-569A patch J.3 BIOS version is ready and I sent you a download link via PM.
Please let us know how this new BIOS works.

Hi, Jan!
Thank you very much for the new BIOS patched version for Shuttle HOT-596A mobo! I'll give my best to test it tomorrow with some different s7 CPUs and at least two "big" (80 and 250 GB) mechanical ATA HDDs. I've sent you a PM.

Chkcpu wrote on 2024-01-26, 16:28:

Now when you run the BIOS Patcher tool on one of my patched BIOSes, the program may not recognize the bug because I changed the original code.
Then the tool will either not apply that particular patch, or tries to patch my patch. The later can result in unpredictable behaviour.

Yeah, this is exactly what happens and I just wonder why BIOSPatcher doesn't detect that there's no more HDD-volume-limit bugs in yours already manually patched BIOSes, but when the BIOS is factory-free of this bug the software successfully detects this and skips HDD-bug patching. Anyway, I don't use such double-patched BIOSes.

Thanks for the reply!

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-01-26, 16:51:

Hi, Jan!
Thank you very much for the new BIOS patched version for Shuttle HOT-596A mobo! I'll give my best to test it tomorrow with some different s7 CPUs and at least two "big" (80 and 250 GB) mechanical ATA HDDs. I've sent you a PM.

Thanks for your elaborate test reports on the HOT-569A patch J.3 BIOS, looks good! 😀
Both the UDMA and improved 32GB limit bugfixes appear to work as expected.

Here is the new HOT-569A patch J.3 BIOS for anyone who needs it.
Note that this BIOS is not for the HOT-569. The 569 uses a different BIOS, but a newly patched HOT-569 BIOS is available as well earlier in this thread.

Cheers, Jan

Fantastic! Great to see those boards getting some love 😀