Thats just IRQ assignments. P&P is about much more resource allocation stuff.
That manual page is weird. PCI IRQs are Level triggered, Edge would break functionality ? 😮
What is the exact model of your mobo? have you upgraded to latest bios?

If it helps, look at the backup drivers script in my sig.

There's the path to the registry where all the pci devices are.

Should make deleting them faster 🤣

Tried reflashing the card..?
It might be going nuts too

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-12-24, 06:22:

Thats just IRQ assignments. P&P is about much more resource allocation stuff.
That manual page is weird. PCI IRQs are Level triggered, Edge would break functionality ? 😮
What is the exact model of your mobo? have you upgraded to latest bios?

I thought IRQ assignments were part of P&P, on top of memory allocation and such, are IRQ assignments not even related? Well either way, then there doesn't seem to be anything at all in the BIOS related to P&P or any way to disable it, what I showed is the only thing that seems at all related in the BIOS 😒
The ENTIRE MANUAL is weird 🤣 I don't really have experience messing around with other mobos of this vintage, but I get the feeling that there's some weird stuff with this one in general, or at least with the documentation. As for the level/edge triggering, I think the manual explicitly says that that's for cards that might not strictly follow standard PCI implementation, and might need that? But that seems like a WILD feature to actually include to me, I wouldn't expect the motherboard to support that level on nonstandard implementation of a protocol.

Mobo is a Gigabyte GA-586AS. It's not on the latest version, it's 1.21 and according to The Retro Web, the latest version is 1.41. Maybe the updated BIOS has support for disabling P&P, but from what I understood BIOSes of this era aren't simple to flash, I didn't think you could do it on the board, I thought you had to take the EPROM off and flash it on separate hardware, or just replace the ROM, am I mistaken? I swear someone told me that yeeeears ago, but I never looked into it further >_>

Try reinstalling 98 but this time run "setup /p i" this will disable ACPI without any changes to the BIOS or CMOS setup parameters

maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-12-24, 18:20:

Try reinstalling 98 but this time run "setup /p i" this will disable ACPI without any changes to the BIOS or CMOS setup parameters

I'll give that a shot when I've got the time to reinstall Windows 98 again, thank you!

P&P can assign interrupts, but here you only control interrupts and not P&P. Even bios 1.41 is pre win95 release, but maybe fixes enough. At least it includes "Award Plug and Play BIOS Extension v1.0A"
Bios does look flashable, you would flash it with something like awdflash.exe, but its best to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong. Either external programmer or hotflashing (*) second chip using uniflash.exe.

*
- prepare bios chip for easy removal by loosening it a little, maybe put thread underneath so its easy to pull out
- set bios Cachebale
- boot to dos
- replace bios chip with spare while computer running
- execute uniflash and flash new version

Can you save your current bios and post it here ? There is not much out there for the GA-586AS but did find a "flash util" on Giga's 1997 archived website.
The old archive points to a pdf manual that must have been a mistake, it points to the 586AL/S...

maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-12-24, 18:20:

Try reinstalling 98 but this time run "setup /p i" this will disable ACPI without any changes to the BIOS or CMOS setup parameters

Max, will that option also work to disable ACPI for the Windows 95 setup as well? I wanna install Windows 95 on a separate Compact Flash card as well.

Horun wrote on 2024-12-25, 14:50:

Can you save your current bios and post it here ? There is not much out there for the GA-586AS but did find a "flash util" on Giga's 1997 archived website.
The old archive points to a pdf manual that must have been a mistake, it points to the 586AL/S...

Horun, that is fantastic, thank you so much! I thought I looked at archived Gigabyte website pages at some point, but either I missed it or I just imagined doing that 🤣 I've noticed the same thing about the GA-586AS, in terms of there being EXCEEDINGLY little documentation or information about it available on the web, I'm extremely grateful that my uncle who I inherited this from saved the manuals for all the hardware all these years, as weird and kinda crappy as the docs are. I should scan the manuals for the GA-586AS and the PCI IDE & I/O card that came with it to make them available.

The main site that I've seen/been using for general searchable hardware info is The Retro Web, and I know The Internet Archive is always a good place for this kind of thing, and the Vogons Wiki would be a good idea too... is there anywhere else y'all recommend I post/submit the docs to?

As far as saving the current BIOS for archival purposes... can you recommend software for doing so? In case it wasn't obvious already, I'm not super familiar with working under the hood on PCs of this vintage 😜

You could try Uniflash. Also one of the early Award flashers should be able to backup the current bios.

Ah great, currently trying to flash the BIOS using the Gigabyte utility but it's stuck right away at "Blanking Flash Memory" 😒
I did get copies of the BIOS and have them saved in a few locations, here's the GA586-AS 1.21 BIOS

Fingers crossed that I didn't brick the damn thing in the process of trying to flash it, really don't wanna have to deal with that.

EDIT: Well, there's some good news at least, doesn't seem to have done anything, the utility presumably never managed to start blanking the BIOS ROM, so it booted just fine. I could try flashing it with Uniflash, but I'm more inclined to believe that the utility from Gigabyte themselves is gonna be better...

Anyway, on the chance that I did something wrong, is there anything else that I'll have to worry about for being able to flash the BIOS, other than booting up into a clean DOS without any memory managers or TSRs or anything, then just run the utility and give it the filename of the updated BIOS?