igully wrote on 2024-09-30, 22:04:
So yes, they are a hassle to work with because you are not their customer, just a user of their products in a niche segment. They are not being nasty, it is that they need to pay the bills and shareholders are always looking whom to blame with CEOs hunting for additional income and cost cutting opportunities. It is a very competitive market with lots of players and small margins.
I never said they were being "nasties", I only said their products are a hassle to maintain (read recover, repair, upgrade or patch to fix code problems on them). After all they are business as you said, they can, and have their respectable motives for what they do.
But this "just one user of their products in a niche segment" also have, and gave his opinion on their ways and motives. I would care less if they can't meet their expectations of their shareholders. Just like this "one niche user" isn't their problem, their problems aren't MY problem. The reality for everyone in the retro repair community is that AMI and Award BIOSes from "white box OEM" board manufacturers are the most easy to work with, with Award BIOSes being the clear winners. From the recovery of missing ROM chips with with widely available, uncrypted binary images in the net, to even decompress, disassemble, patch, reassemble and recompress the binary images to solve code bugs in core functionality and features.
Now, I understand Micro Firmware special case, as their main business was offering firmware upgrade services, and resellers of specific products like PCMCIA Cardware drivers, Y2K/Int13 update cards, USB and Firewire stacks for DOS, etc. I get they had to protect their business. They weren't mainboard vendors. Also, there is the difficult, but existing alternative to get the original mainboard vendor firmware images for the boards their product updates, and generally is possible to make 3rd party patches for these vendor provided images, as these boards original BIOSes were mostly AMI or Award. People have a choice to dump and use Micro Firmware firmware images on other boards, or patch the originals coming with the board.
But I'm sorry I can't shred a tear and tell the same for the Phoenix conglomerate and their "poor poor" shareholders.
PD: Now, about the main topic... Probably everyone here already knows, but many CPU upgrade kits from Evergreen and others came with a CD which basically was a "repository" of complete and updated firmware images from Micro Firmware. It seems these are full binary images, but them are encrypted files, so them can't be used to directly flash to clean chips on boards without ROM, or with faulty ROM. But them still can be used to update working boards. And someone can dump the chips of the updated boards with the Micro Firmware utility for anyone requesting help for a board with a dead ROM chip.
Also, and unfortunately these CDs don't have all the files offered by Micro Firmware on them as well. The excluded files are mostly Phoenix BIOS ROMs again.