Try uniflash

kickloch wrote on 2025-12-09, 12:54:

Hi my dear vogons and friends,

I recently got myself a new retro mainboard, the ASUS SP97-V this time. It came with a K6 233 @3,2V which seems to be one of the better CPUs supported by the installed BIOS version. For K6-2 I'd be required to update to a higher version, since it is unsupported by the installed 1.06 BIOS. Problem is here, that all Awardflash tool versions report an unknown and unsupported flash chip, as well as ASUS' own Aflash doesn't know the chip. What am I supposed to do here? Can I update it any other way? Help appreciated, thanks in advance!

yeah flashing you're bios really depends on the board, also you have to check if you disabled bios write protection on you're board (jumper pins), in later boards its mostly in the bios setting, few of my boards that i got were OEM, non of them worked with uniflash but worked/detected with AWDflash perfectly fine, and even flashed a MSI MS6117 ver 1.1 with specific flash program that was ment for AMI bios. it worked on my first try. some boards it's a guessing game

I know those early Asus boards used their proprietary version called Aflash, but early on I realized that (certainly with the TXP4 and the P55T2P4) it was easier to use Uniflash rather than chase down the correct version of Aflash.

That being said, it is possible that the original flash chip has been replaced at some point, but probably not.

THX for the replies! I don't think the BIOS chip has been replaced, it looks kinda original to me with the AWARD Sticker and so on. I guess I give Uniflash a try.

@vintageonthemoon Had it been write protected the one or the other way, I wonder if it would show UNKNOWN CHIP in flash programming tools. Do you think so?

UNIFLASH didn't work either, reports UNKNOWN FLASH as well.
After some digging I managed to get the very old tool PFLASH 1.6 from ASUS in my hands. And guess what, it's the first and only flash tool that recognizes an ATMEL AT29C010A chip. Updating went fine with that one. I'm happy now. K6-2 incoming 😁

Good work finding something that got the job done. It used to be that they would have the correct flash utility for download along with the BIOS file; another way was that the BIOS file would be in a .zip package that also included the flash utility. I recently had trouble finding the correct version of Awardflash for my Asus A8N SLI and I found the correct version of Awardflash by reading the manual where they had an illustration showing the flash procedure and I was then able to track it down.

Yeah same here, in the manual there were "screenshots" of the PFLASH tool. Otherwise I'd never remember it even existed. I have known Aflash from my K7M, but Pflash was completely out of my mind. Some russian site provides it, pretty hard to find.

Hi kickloch,

Nice you could update the SP97-V BIOS with the old PFLAH 1.6 tool.

Asus’s own AFLASH tool is indeed the correct flasher for this board, however you have to use Aflash v2.02 for Asus socket 7 boards. This version works here on every Asus socket 7 board I’ve tried it on. Later Aflash versions often don’t support the earlier EEPROM’s on these boards anymore.
You can download Aflash v2.02 from my website at:
http://www.steunebrink.info/aflash202.zip

Which SP97-V BIOS version did you flash?
If you used my 0109v-5 patch J.2 version from TRW, note that I have an improved patch J.3 version on my ‘The Unofficial K6-2+/III+ page’ now. The link is in my signature below.

In this SP97-V patch J.3 BIOS I’ve added two additional bug fixes in respect to the previous J.2 BIOS:
- A new 32GB HDD limit bugfix that doesn’t hang anymore on > 128GiB drives. This fix allows drives up to 640GiB to be attached, although the BIOS will then only 'see' the first 128GiB due to the 28-bit LBA limit of the socket 7 platform.
- A fix for the second 64GB HDD limit bug so the IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION menu selection works normally now on > 64GB drives.
(The first 64GB limit bug that hung the BIOS at the summary screen when a drive larger than 65535MB was displayed, was already fixed in the patch J.2 BIOS.)
The other patches, like the added K6-2+/III+ support, are the same as in the J.2 BIOS and as usual I’ve included a PATCH.TXT file in the zip that lists all the changes I’ve made.

Cheers, Jan

Hey Jan,

nice to meet you here 😀 First of all I downloaded the 1.09 beta BIOS from the ASUS website but then I noticed that I couldn't flash it with the most common tools. Now that I got this issue resolved I can go ahead and try flashing your improved BIOS version. Got some III+ lying around here, so I would love to take advantage of it. Thanks for clarifying the issue with the Aflash versions, that's definitely good to know. And also I would like to thank and salute you for all the effort you took to supply us S7 lovers with a great variety of options!

Cheers!

kickloch wrote on 2025-12-10, 18:43:

Hey Jan,

nice to meet you here 😀 First of all I downloaded the 1.09 beta BIOS from the ASUS website but then I noticed that I couldn't flash it with the most common tools. Now that I got this issue resolved I can go ahead and try flashing your improved BIOS version. Got some III+ lying around here, so I would love to take advantage of it. Thanks for clarifying the issue with the Aflash versions, that's definitely good to know. And also I would like to thank and salute you for all the effort you took to supply us S7 lovers with a great variety of options!

Cheers!

Thanks for your kind reply. 😀

B.t.w. did you see Necroware’s nice video about this board?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaOXLErWcPc

Enjoy, Jan

Hey Jan,

Yes, I did. When this board popped up on eBay here in Germany I immediately thought, hey isn't this the board Necroware featured on his channel lately. And I was watching out for a SiS based Socket7 board anyway, so I knew I had to get this. Luckily I did 😀 I absolutely love Necroware's videos, for me he is a legend, just like you are! You guys contribute so much to the retro scene, it's just amazing. Thank you again!