VOGONS


How about a MR-BIOS ROM file repository?

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Reply 180 of 385, by Anonymous Coward

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mt777 wrote on 2020-09-16, 01:24:
MRVFONE wrote on 2020-08-25, 08:50:

Has anyone had issues getting into the MR BIOS menu?? Mine says to press ESC.... But nothing happnes. Tryed a diffrent keyboard.. no change. The leds blink on the keyboards when there pluged in etc.... Have to see if i can find an old DIN type plug just in case...

I had similiar problems with asus 386 when FPU was improper set via jumper

Try CTRL-ALT-ESC instead.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 181 of 385, by MrKsoft

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For reference, wanted to document some attempts I made with a few of these BIOSes on a Diamond Flower 386/25-33-40UCE Rev A board. (Board is extremely similar to the 386/33-40UCE that has available jumper info online-- but it isn't the same board! The locations of everything are moved around ever so slightly...) The board uses the UMC UM82C481BF/UM82C482AF chipset. That lines up with the following files listed earlier in the thread:

V037B301 UMC_301 UMC WriteBack 82C48X 386 WriteBack, Rev 0 *ONLY*
V037B302 UMC_302 UMC WriteBack 82C48X 386 WriteBack, Rev A,B *ONLY* (Not REV-0 !)
V037B304 UMC_304 UMC WriteBack 82C48X 386 WriteBack, Rev A,B *ONLY* (Not REV-0 !) x037b302, for Cyrix layout with A20M and FLUSH

None of these worked 100% correctly. V037B301 just causes the speaker to emit a low tone (probably expected since it's "Rev 0 Only"). V037B302 and V037B304 boot fine but only detected memory in Bank 0. (I have eight 1MB SIMMs installed across Bank 0 and Bank 1, which are detected and functional on the original AMIBIOS). I don't expect there's really a solution to this, but I thought I'd report it as it could affect other UM82C48x boards.

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Reply 182 of 385, by 386_junkie

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I have a about 6 or 7 motherboards (386) with MR BIOS ROM's... have been meaning to dump / back them up.

I recall there may be a way to do it in DOS without requiring a EPROM programmer, it that right?

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Reply 183 of 385, by keropi

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386_junkie wrote on 2020-09-22, 18:27:

I have a about 6 or 7 motherboards (386) with MR BIOS ROM's... have been meaning to dump / back them up.

I recall there may be a way to do it in DOS without requiring a EPROM programmer, it that right?

programmer is the best to use, software methods are not 100%
you will get some data but it would not be the data on the eprom and thus will be unusable
we've faced this on the amstrad 486slc bios images, software grabbers like NSSI did not produce correct data

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Reply 184 of 385, by Am386DX-40

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Guys, I have a Seritech SER-386ADIII with ALI M1429/M1431 chipset. Every time I install an FPU it hangs and won't boot, or be very very unstable. Was thinking of trying a MR-BIOS with it, but I haven't found any for ALI chipsets. Is there anything out there?

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7dnIS5P.jpg

Reply 185 of 385, by jesolo

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Am386DX-40 wrote on 2020-10-03, 05:45:
Guys, I have a Seritech SER-386ADIII with ALI M1429/M1431 chipset. Every time I install an FPU it hangs and won't boot, or be ve […]
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Guys, I have a Seritech SER-386ADIII with ALI M1429/M1431 chipset. Every time I install an FPU it hangs and won't boot, or be very very unstable. Was thinking of trying a MR-BIOS with it, but I haven't found any for ALI chipsets. Is there anything out there?

Photo taken from another user:

7dnIS5P.jpg

Firstly, desolder that barrel battery before it causes damage.

There might be a jumper on the motherboard that enables and disables the FPU. Have a look on Th99 to see if you can identify your board.

The chipset is the ALI M1429, which was quite a common chipset used by 386 motherboards from that era.

Reply 186 of 385, by Am386DX-40

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jesolo wrote on 2020-10-03, 07:57:
Firstly, desolder that barrel battery before it causes damage. […]
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Am386DX-40 wrote on 2020-10-03, 05:45:
Guys, I have a Seritech SER-386ADIII with ALI M1429/M1431 chipset. Every time I install an FPU it hangs and won't boot, or be ve […]
Show full quote

Guys, I have a Seritech SER-386ADIII with ALI M1429/M1431 chipset. Every time I install an FPU it hangs and won't boot, or be very very unstable. Was thinking of trying a MR-BIOS with it, but I haven't found any for ALI chipsets. Is there anything out there?

Photo taken from another user:

7dnIS5P.jpg

Firstly, desolder that barrel battery before it causes damage.

There might be a jumper on the motherboard that enables and disables the FPU. Have a look on Th99 to see if you can identify your board.

The chipset is the ALI M1429, which was quite a common chipset used by 386 motherboards from that era.

That's not my actual board, it's a picture I found here on vogons. It's exactly the same though. There's no jumper for FPU, just an option in the bios to try to detect it or not.

Reply 187 of 385, by techweenie

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I'm desperately looking for the Acer M1209 files. These would apply to the Acer 1116sx/1120sx and Canon C-200 computers, among others probably.

V058B300 ACER300 386SX chipset, no turbo-LED
V058B304 ACER304 x058B300 with turbo-LED active Lo (TL-)
V058B305 ACER305 x058B300 with turbo-LED active Hi (TL+)

V058B301 ACER301 no turbo-LED, with fast-A20 optimization (*)
V058B306 ACER306 (TL-) with fast-A20 optimization (*)
V058B307 ACER307 (TL+) with fast-A20 optimization (*)

Reply 188 of 385, by drosse1meyer

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Hi All

Being stuck home and all I've gotten the itch to play around with vintage hardware from my childhood. To that end I acquired a Packard Bell p166 which uses the 430vx chipset. Unfortunately the PCI video card I had laying around isnt recognized by the system but I think it's because it may be a pci v2 vs 2.3 issue. Was hoping a MRBIOS flash would address the problem...

In that vein, does anyone know where to get the correct exe tools to flash? I *think* I found the BIOS I need from the Evergreen Spectra CD (V09ab5ni.eti), but not sure how to get this loaded. The Spectra setup constantly asks me to put a floppy in A:, however I did that with a floppy made from the disk image in the same post, and it still won't proceed. Figured I may be able to take the V09ab5ni.eti file, rename to .bio and use it with standard MRFLASH tool.

Any ideas?

Thanks

P1: Packard Bell - 233 MMX, Voodoo1, 64 MB, ALS100+
P2-V2: Dell Dimension - 400 Mhz, Voodoo2, 256 MB
P!!! Custom: 1 Ghz, GeForce2 Pro/64MB, 384 MB

Reply 189 of 385, by techweenie

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drosse1meyer wrote on 2020-11-17, 17:51:
Hi All […]
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Hi All

Being stuck home and all I've gotten the itch to play around with vintage hardware from my childhood. To that end I acquired a Packard Bell p166 which uses the 430vx chipset. Unfortunately the PCI video card I had laying around isnt recognized by the system but I think it's because it may be a pci v2 vs 2.3 issue. Was hoping a MRBIOS flash would address the problem...

In that vein, does anyone know where to get the correct exe tools to flash? I *think* I found the BIOS I need from the Evergreen Spectra CD (V09ab5ni.eti), but not sure how to get this loaded. The Spectra setup constantly asks me to put a floppy in A:, however I did that with a floppy made from the disk image in the same post, and it still won't proceed. Figured I may be able to take the V09ab5ni.eti file, rename to .bio and use it with standard MRFLASH tool.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Those eti files are some kind of proprietary format. You can't flash them directly. It is possible to interrupt the floppy boot process to get to a command prompt and run the flash utility manually. It may know how to decompress the rom file. Just be careful, there's often no going back unless you have a rom burner.

Reply 190 of 385, by drosse1meyer

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techweenie wrote on 2020-11-17, 18:03:
drosse1meyer wrote on 2020-11-17, 17:51:
Hi All […]
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Hi All

Being stuck home and all I've gotten the itch to play around with vintage hardware from my childhood. To that end I acquired a Packard Bell p166 which uses the 430vx chipset. Unfortunately the PCI video card I had laying around isnt recognized by the system but I think it's because it may be a pci v2 vs 2.3 issue. Was hoping a MRBIOS flash would address the problem...

In that vein, does anyone know where to get the correct exe tools to flash? I *think* I found the BIOS I need from the Evergreen Spectra CD (V09ab5ni.eti), but not sure how to get this loaded. The Spectra setup constantly asks me to put a floppy in A:, however I did that with a floppy made from the disk image in the same post, and it still won't proceed. Figured I may be able to take the V09ab5ni.eti file, rename to .bio and use it with standard MRFLASH tool.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Those eti files are some kind of proprietary format. You can't flash them directly. It is possible to interrupt the floppy boot process to get to a command prompt and run the flash utility manually. It may know how to decompress the rom file. Just be careful, there's often no going back unless you have a rom burner.

Wow thanks for the fast reply.

That's too bad. So I guess the only way forward is to get this Spectra app working right in win95, or acquire the official MRBIOS for a PB Orlando motherboard. Maybe someone will see this and be kind enough to post or link files as I can't seem to find much out there 🙁

P1: Packard Bell - 233 MMX, Voodoo1, 64 MB, ALS100+
P2-V2: Dell Dimension - 400 Mhz, Voodoo2, 256 MB
P!!! Custom: 1 Ghz, GeForce2 Pro/64MB, 384 MB

Reply 191 of 385, by Anonymous Coward

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We have the MR BIOS for the ALi 1217, but the 1209 hasn't been found yet.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 193 of 385, by douglar

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techweenie wrote on 2020-11-19, 05:35:
Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-11-18, 05:53:

We have the MR BIOS for the ALi 1217, but the 1209 hasn't been found yet.

I tried the 1217 MR BIOS on my 1209 and it was not happy. Oh well.

Sad to hear that. I have an old 1209 board and I'd love to put MR Bios on it.

Reply 194 of 385, by dataino.it

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MG TK 82C480 + V037B40G - UMC WriteBack 82C48X 486

I had this motherboard to fix without bios and on the first try .. it works .....

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you,

PS. If anyone has the original bios it would do me a great pleasure

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Reply 195 of 385, by GigAHerZ

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My googleing skills have not been enough... 🙁

It would be absolutely amazing, if someone would have MR BIOS for SIS 85C471 based chipsets.
Information from one of the bios packs here, in the thread: (but the bios itself was missing 🙁 )

Filename   Port      Description  SIS 85C471
-------- ------- ---------------------------------------------------------
V089B410 SIS_410 4 Mem Banks, REG_6A=FF
V089B411 SIS_411 6 Mem Banks, REG_6A=FF
V089B412 SIS_412 8 Mem Banks, REG_6A=FF

V089B413 SIS_413 4 Mem Banks, REG_6A=00
V089B414 SIS_414 6 Mem Banks, REG_6A=00
V089B415 SIS_415 8 Mem Banks, REG_6A=00

NOTE: The versions above are but a few samples of the
many ingenious multiplex schemes possible with
this chipset. (Hint: try V089B410 first).

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!

Reply 197 of 385, by Predator99

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Robin4 wrote on 2020-12-24, 13:42:

Is there any MR bios for 286 Suntac chipset?

As written in the other thread, try
Re: How about a MR-BIOS ROM file repository?
It seems to be a generic 286 Version.

Reply 198 of 385, by dataino.it

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I saw this picture of a motherboard and it struck me that it has both an AMI bios but also that there is a chip marked "MR BIOS" V303UT next to the keyboard connector.

what is that ?

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