Re-flash the original BIOS and try with that.

I’m having difficulty flashing the original HP BIOS back.. the HP flash utility comes up with an error and using Uniflash resulted in a bad flash and BIOS beep code (1-3-3-1).

Without disabling the onboard audio am I pretty much stuck? 😒

Since the HP bios is rubbish and I don’t even seem to be able to flash it.. and the onboard audio is very poor/next to useless... do you think there’d be any ill effects from just physically removing the audio chip from the board to get rid of it completely?

britain4 wrote:

I’m having difficulty flashing the original HP BIOS back.. the HP flash utility comes up with an error and using Uniflash resulted in a bad flash and BIOS beep code (1-3-3-1).

Without disabling the onboard audio am I pretty much stuck? 😒

Since the HP bios is rubbish and I don’t even seem to be able to flash it.. and the onboard audio is very poor/next to useless... do you think there’d be any ill effects from just physically removing the audio chip from the board to get rid of it completely?

Did you try a few different settings in uniflash? I think uniflash puts extra information into the BIOS if you choose to include the boot block and this could be incompatible with the OEM HP BIOS. I recently used uniflash on a PC Chips SIS board to flash a BIOS chip for a completely unrelated device (a Roland MT-200) and when I told it to include the boot block it didn't work. I then dumped this ROM and inspected it with a hex editor and I found all sorts of extra junk in the file related to ASUS and other vendors... things that were obviously not in the ROM image that I flashed to the chip. When I told uniflash to flash without the boot block it worked perfectly. Perhaps the OEM BIOS needs to be flashed this same way, without uniflash adding any extra stuff.

I could certainly try that out. When I first got the board it had a suspected bad flash/corrupted BIOS which was fixed by me hot flashing the very same HP BIOS on there with Uniflash - which now results in it refusing to POST.

I then flashed a modified SP97-XV BIOS since the boards are nearly identical thanks to advice from this forum (the SP97 has SIMM slots but no onboard audio, and is otherwise identical) and it gave loads of extra features, a faster POST, large hard drive support, K6+ support, no annoying HP logo and the option of populating the empty PCI and ISA pads if I so desire.

To be honest I’d rather just get rid of the sound chip than go back to the HP BIOS for the reasons specified above but I don’t want to be stuck with no audio at all if it doesn’t work. I’m going to try the HP one again using the method you described, see if there’s an option to disable the audio in there and take it from there. There’s a jumper for the video but not the audio!

I don’t really understand why the audio wouldn’t work as is, there aren’t any conflicts reported and it has the option to switch between the onboard Crystal and Yamaha audio in Windows, and the drivers are installed - but when the Yamaha card is in there neither of them work so there must be some odd conflict going on somewhere probably related to them both being on the ISA bus? And the ESS Audiodrive just results in it hanging at POST!

You could try some contact cleaner in the ISA slots. Of course, let it dry fully before powering back on.

My socket 7 motherboard needed the ISA slots to be exercised a bit before they start working properly.

It sounds like you're labouring under an incorrect asssumption: you seem to think you can only have one sound card in a system, and so that the issues you are having with your ISA sound cards might be solved by removing the onboard sound. That simply isn't true. You can easily have multiple sound cards in the same system, even working simultaneously if they don't have resource conflicts. Moreover, conflicts would only lead to one or both of the devices not functioning. It would not impact booting.

So, getting rid of the onboard sound isn't magically going to fix your problems. Don't waste time (or vandalize your board) barking up that tree.

The problem sounds like hardware, but it might als be resource related. Are these PnP cards? And which address, IRQ and DMA are they using?

dionb wrote:

It sounds like you're labouring under an incorrect asssumption: you seem to think you can only have one sound card in a system, and so that the issues you are having with your ISA sound cards might be solved by removing the onboard sound. That simply isn't true. You can easily have multiple sound cards in the same system, even working simultaneously if they don't have resource conflicts. Moreover, conflicts would only lead to one or both of the devices not functioning. It would not impact booting.

So, getting rid of the onboard sound isn't magically going to fix your problems. Don't waste time (or vandalize your board) barking up that tree.

The problem sounds like hardware, but it might als be resource related. Are these PnP cards? And which address, IRQ and DMA are they using?

It’s not necessarily that, I guess I was just wondering if there was some kind of conflict related to the BIOS from a board with no onboard sound on it. The sound cards both work fine when tested in another system so it seems like it’s related to the board. I’ll start looking elsewhere then 😀

The onboard sound does register as a PnP card as does the Yamaha one. I haven’t looked into exactly which resources each are using but Windows isn’t reporting any conflicts.

Plus removing the chip wont guarantee the motherboard still wont detect the soundcard, even if the chip is missing.
Much better to work out what resources the onboard device is using and work around them.

Do you have an option to turn PNP off? that way you can set the resources manually. Early PNP was pretty bad anyway

chinny22 wrote:

Plus removing the chip wont guarantee the motherboard still wont detect the soundcard, even if the chip is missing.
Much better to work out what resources the onboard device is using and work around them.

Do you have an option to turn PNP off? that way you can set the resources manually. Early PNP was pretty bad anyway

That it why we used to call it Plug N Pray. 🤣

Welp, I'm in a similar boat on this. The onboard audio is next to useless and Windows 98SE is refusing to detect the Sound Blaster AWE32.

I can tell you that the HP BIOS doesn't allow you to disable the onboard audio at all.

I'm gonna make sure the ISA slot is clean and give it another shot.

I'll probably also look into that modified BIOS as it sounds like better CPU support is included. Does it also allow 512MB of ram? Right now on the HP BIOS (v1.05) I can only get up to 384MB working (256 + 128).

Thanks!

Edit: OK now I'm boned... I just used the official BIOS flashing utility to try upgrading from v1.05 to v1.10 and it's a bad flash~ (1-3-3-1 beep as mentioned above), I don't have a way to flash bios chips... 😭

Do you have another board with the same BIOS socket? You could potentially use that to hot flash the EEPROM.

Nope, these SPAX boards are hard to come by. A second one would cost me more than the current one did.

Almost any S7/SS7/Slot1/SlotA/Socket370/Socket462 board with the same EEPROM socket can probably be used for a hot flash.

This was my first foray into Socket7 motherboards other than my IBM Aptiva 2176 so it's the only one I have with that socket. Had I done a bit more research, I probably would have picked up an actual SP97-XV instead of the SPAX, but alas here we are.

I definitely also bought a lot of stuff I wouldn't have if I knew more when I started out.
Ironically the SP97-XV is was one of the first two retro motherboards I bought.😅

If you don't have any other board with the same EEPROM socket for hot flashing maybe another member will help you out by flashing your EEPROM if you send it to them and include an return label?

Would something like this do the job? (I have no experience using these... yet!)

https://www.amazon.ca/TL866II-Programmer-Aide … 2dDbGljaz10cnVl

IcySon55 wrote on 2020-10-25, 20:21:

Would something like this do the job? (I have no experience using these... yet!)

https://www.amazon.ca/TL866II-Programmer-Aide … 2dDbGljaz10cnVl

Yes, that's the go-to flasher for cheap no-problems-flash-everything.

But I'd give you same advice as OP: instead of focusing on BIOS and disabling stuff, just figure out resource allocation and work around that, same as you would with two ISA sound cards in the same system.

dionb wrote on 2020-10-26, 01:14:

Yes, that's the go-to flasher for cheap no-problems-flash-everything.

But I'd give you same advice as OP: instead of focusing on BIOS and disabling stuff, just figure out resource allocation and work around that, same as you would with two ISA sound cards in the same system.

That's precisely where I was going next. Until the upgrade bricked the board. Now I'm stuck at flashing the BIOS. However, I was going to need the SP97-XV BIOS anyways since it has AMD K6-2+ support, which I plan to upgrade to.

One thing though, even before the upgrade attempt, Windows 98 was completely unable to detect the Sound Blaster AWE32. It is a non-PnP card, so perhaps it was blocked by the onboard card on the same resources?

In the original HP BIOS, it was not possible to assign resources at all or even see the reservations, so the solution would likely have been to set the resources on the Sound Blaster AWE32 using its jumpers I imagine.

Welp, time to look for a cheaper place to source the programmer... hopefully.

In the original HP BIOS, it was not possible to assign resources at all or even see the reservations, so the solution would likely have been to set the resources on the Sound Blaster AWE32 using its jumpers I imagine.

Exactly.

Default assumption of an SB-compatible solution would be A220 I5 D1 P330, so try setting the AWE32 to A240 I7 (or 3) D0 (or 3), H5 (or 6) P300 or so.