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8086/8088 BIOS Manufacturers

cr1901

cr1901

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I know that Phoenix Technologies and American Megatrends, and Columbia Data Products created 8088 BIOSes in addition to IBM... and while looking over the BIOS listings as well as surfing minuszerodegrees.net, a question came up: does anyone know Award Software create a BIOS for 8088-class machines? From what I gathered by a quick look at archive.org, Award Software was founded in 1983- before the 286- but the oldest BIOS I can find from Award is that hosted on minuszerodegrees, "Version 3.03GS" of their then-286 "Modular BIOS". Something tells me that "Version 3.03GS" of their "Modular BIOS" would not be the first version of their product that they released to the public- what happened to version 1.0, 2.02G, or 2.718281JKLMNOP (If that really existed, I'd question their versioning system)?

In fact, this leads me to ask the follow-up question: I was wondering if anyone had an idea of just how many companies produced BIOSes for the original PC and PC XT? Though the original PC BIOS is a complicated piece of software, the assembly listings are very well documented- as an individual who would actually spend his time torturing himself reading x86 listings, I can understand them fairly well. So I'm not surprised that a group of paid engineers in various PC manufacturers would be able to reverse engineer the BIOS of these machines as well.

I know that at least the following companies created clone 8088-class BIOSes: Phoenix Technology, Columbia Data Products, Compaq, American Megatrends, Juko Electronics, and Falcon Technology (possibly Award?). Can anyone add to this list?

This may not be the right place to ask, but does anyone have ROM images of any these clone BIOSes (I didn't see many in the 5150 thread)? Particularly Award, Phoenix, and American Megatrends, since PC makers often licensed (some still do) their BIOSes for use in their systems; I'm genuinely curious to see how well one clone BIOS will run in another machine provided the clone reasonably emulates the chips of PC architecture (i.e. anything not made by Tandy) :p.
 
I have a few images of other XT-type BIOSes.

Perhaps the biggest and most wide-spread was one you never heard of--ERSO. The ERSO BIOS dates from 1982 and was developed by a Taiwan government agency. Since it was licensed free of charge to any clone builder, just about every Taiwan clone XT used it. It may have had other names embedded in it (the best known is DTK), but they're all ERSO or ERSO-based.

IBM tried to block ERSO BIOS-equipped systems from entering the US (which was one of the reasons that the name was changed when a vendor put it in a system), but finally had to give in in 1984, when inexpensive clones promptly flooded the market.
 
Are you willing to send me the images you have (simply for the sake of trying them out in Emulators and the like)? In addition, you got me interested in purchasing an ERSO BIOS ROM chip that I found online... seems like a 'fun' disassembly project.
 
Yeah, I do--scattered here and there. How do I get them to you?

BTW, do you have this one? A BIOS extension ROM for the Novell Infoshare card in a Televideo Personal Mini (80186/Z80 box). I've got other extension ROMs if you collect those.
 

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Sorry for the extremely delayed reply lol- school started and I've been busy. Can you send me your images to my personal email? I will PM you with the address. And thanks for the information both of you.
 
The AT&T PC-6300\Olivetti M24 have a BIOS that isn't branded other than "Resident Diagnostics Vx.xx", anyone know if that's made by Olivetti or someone else?
 
I dug out a few old bioses I've been hanging on to for 20 to 25 years. Several IBM, including XT(5160) and some others that I'm not positive which ones are which exactly because the labels all fell off into a pile. :) My bad. Fortunately the XT(5160) was easily identifyable by its chip numbers as I needed to replace a ROM BASIC chip in my XT the other day. I was getting a POST error.

I also have D&A, IBM, DTK, ERSO, and one I'm not sure of -- _attersen -- I can't be sure what the first letter in the name is. Could be a D or a V. I can read 720, 1.2 drive on its label so it's apparently some sort of hack to allow non-standard drives to be used on the XT.

Then I have a handful of EEPROMs my buddy burned for me back then and those are the difficult ones to ID because they all had their labels fall off. But I guess if they are put into a prom burner they can be figured out. If cr1901 wants to get together with me on this project we might make some progress.
 
I need to pop the two chips in a ROM reader for people to look at, but my XT286 has a BIOS written by a company called PerformancePCs in 1986.
I'm not sure if it's generic or was written for this machine (I beleive it's generic but can't be sure) but it allows the use of memory as a big disk cache before the days of RAMDRIVE perhaps? Certainly not common though, can't find anything on google :S Not sure if that counts for the list, bit of an oddball find.
 
Now I'm wondering who did the BIOS for the AT&T 6300. I was always rather fascinated with it; it was a lot more "talkative" than other PC BIOSes (note that this was before I ever saw the Award XT BIOS). I've always suspected it was Phoenix, since some of the utilities in AT&T's DOS were Phoenix, but actually reading the published source makes me think that Olivetti might have done it themselves.
 
lee4hmz said:
Now I'm wondering who did the BIOS for the AT&T 6300. I was always rather fascinated with it; it was a lot more "talkative" than other PC BIOSes (note that this was before I ever saw the Award XT BIOS). I've always suspected it was Phoenix, since some of the utilities in AT&T's DOS were Phoenix, but actually reading the published source makes me think that Olivetti might have done it themselves.
Click to expand...

Wait... the source code is published? Do you have a link?

Also SpidersWeb, I know I made this thread 3 years ago, but do you happen to have a dump of that BIOS?
 
Stone said:
I dug out a few old bioses I've been hanging on to for 20 to 25 years. Several IBM, including XT(5160) and some others that I'm not positive which ones are which exactly because the labels all fell off into a pile. :) My bad. Fortunately the XT(5160) was easily identifyable by its chip numbers as I needed to replace a ROM BASIC chip in my XT the other day. I was getting a POST error.

I also have D&A, IBM, DTK, ERSO, and one I'm not sure of -- _attersen -- I can't be sure what the first letter in the name is. Could be a D or a V. I can read 720, 1.2 drive on its label so it's apparently some sort of hack to allow non-standard drives to be used on the XT.

Then I have a handful of EEPROMs my buddy burned for me back then and those are the difficult ones to ID because they all had their labels fall off. But I guess if they are put into a prom burner they can be figured out. If cr1901 wants to get together with me on this project we might make some progress.
Click to expand...
I'm open to doing this in a few months if you are still living in the area :p. I can bring my EPROM burner/reader ISA card, if you can provide a 286 PC or above (min. required for this software).
 
cr1901 said:
Also SpidersWeb, I know I made this thread 3 years ago, but do you happen to have a dump of that BIOS?
Click to expand...
I think so, and the original chips. I'll dig them out, just send me a PM if I don't reply with a link in a few days.
I ended up with two of those motherboards - both dead, both with random disk cache software as an expansion ROM squished on to the same chip as the BIOS etc.
WaveMate 286E's - 8bit XT design with a 286 CPU.
 
I have two XT-class clones, a Commodore PC20-III and a Philips P3105. I'd be willing to dump their BIOS if you tell me how (is there a tool to dump it to some standard format? Is it just some standard debug commands? What? :)).
The Commodore one should be interesting, since it is auto-configuring (I wonder what it will do in an emulator or other motherboard). It is made by Phoenix.
I think the Philips one is fairly straightforward... except that my machine has 768KB of memory. It doesn't say much at bootup, just "Philips ROM 1.x" I believe.
 
Scali said:
I have two XT-class clones, a Commodore PC20-III and a Philips P3105. I'd be willing to dump their BIOS if you tell me how (is there a tool to dump it to some standard format? Is it just some standard debug commands? What? :)).
Click to expand...

DEBUG can be used but I would use PCJRCART.COM from here instead. Use the -noheaders option.
 
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