VOGONS


First post, by GPA

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Hello everyone,

i have recently acquired an old Dell 386SX board with an onboard WD90C11 VGA controller. It was sold without a BIOS chip. I am trying to make it running and i have a few 386 BIOS images, but the VGA bios seems to be embedded into the system bios chip, thus the chip being 128K (64K for system BIOS + 64K for VGA BIOS). The POST card shows some POST codes running when i flash a 386 bios, but there is no picture as VGA BIOS is missing.

If anyone has a WD90C11 BIOS from a standalone VGA card, i think i can merge it with a 386 system BIOS to see if it runs or not, but i couldn't find any WD90C11 BIOS image in the internet. Maybe anyone here has one?

Thank you.

Reply 1 of 14, by Imperious

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Try here
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cards/ite … ital-wd90c11-lr

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Reply 3 of 14, by SSTV2

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You can't just slap some random 386 BIOS image into OEM motherboard and expect it to work, how do you know that it's 64k system and 64k VGA BIOS? Maybe it's 64k system and 32k VGA bios compressed down to 80k and the rest of the space reserved for BIOS update/diagnostics/unpack utils?

First thing you need to do is figure out to which specific DELL PC that motherboard belongs and then look for system update diskettes/BIOS images, no one will be able to help you otherwise.

Reply 5 of 14, by GPA

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SSTV2 wrote:

You can't just slap some random 386 BIOS image into OEM motherboard and expect it to work, how do you know that it's 64k system and 64k VGA BIOS? Maybe it's 64k system and 32k VGA bios compressed down to 80k and the rest of the space reserved for BIOS update/diagnostics/unpack utils?

First thing you need to do is figure out to which specific DELL PC that motherboard belongs and then look for system update diskettes/BIOS images, no one will be able to help you otherwise.

Thanks very much to everyone for the help, I am away from home and will try those BIOSess as soon as I ma back

For sure, this is no more than a guess, and it might or might not work. But worth a try since the board is dead and I don't have any idea on how to determine what computer this board comes from, so I guess it either works like this or it makes a donor board (it has an intel 386sx-20 CPU. All the other 386sx boards I gave have AMD CPUs, so I night swap that at least).

Reply 8 of 14, by GPA

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sirlemonhead wrote:

Can you put up a few pictures of the board?

Sorry i am still away (had to leave urgently) and have a limited access to the internet, but here it is:

dell.jpg

Reply 10 of 14, by sirlemonhead

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It looks to have the same video chipset as my Dell 333P. I unfortunately don't currently have any way to make a copy of the chip. Unless there's some software that could do it?

Reply 12 of 14, by GPA

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GPA wrote:

Wow, thanks very much for your help, that really gives some additional ground for the research!

Appreciate very very much.

Hm, i cannot ask you to try uniflash because it can corrupt your BIOS. But thanks anyway.

Reply 14 of 14, by SirNickity

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Did you ever get the BIOS working? I just got a Dell Dimension 386SX/25 with the WD90C11-LR chip onboard. I've been trying to find working video drivers. So far, I've found some Dell pages via Google that have led to "this card is not supported" errors and lockups on loading Windows. The Vogons driver library 1024 and Paradise drivers didn't work either. I could use some suggestions, but if I need to find a way to get you a BIOS image first, I'm definitely willing to make that happen.